A History of the National Conservation Training Center and surrounding area

1271.pdf
[3.47 MB]
Link will provide options to open or save document.

File Format:

Adobe Reader

A History
of the
National Conservation Training Center Property
and surrounding area
Revision July 2008
By Dan Everson2
Preface
My purpose for writing this history of the NCTC property and surrounding lands has been to describe the families that lived here, their strategies for making a living from the natural resources it had to offer, and their activities during the time they occupied the land. Most of my professional career has been spent as a field biologist, and I don’t have a long list of credentials as either a writer or historian. I simply ran across a story that intrigued me more and more as the details fell in place, and felt compelled to share it with others who might be interested in local history. My curiosity was first piqued during several afternoons I spent rambling over the property documenting the presence and distribution of plants. Old foundations and fence lines, broken pottery, bits of brick and glass all suggested a long history of use. Who were these people? What did the landscape look like before and after they arrived? Archaeological reports describing thousands of years of human occupation, the results of surveys and research conducted prior to the construction of NCTC facilities, also furthered an interest in who had lived here in the past. Local histories sometimes mentioned the people who had lived in the Terrapin Neck area, and I thought it might be interesting and useful to put these anecdotes and histories in a more systematic framework that would draw a more complete picture of their lives here. To the extent possible I have tried to make flesh and blood people- with motivations and real family histories- out of names, dates and various legal documents. For source materials I wanted to utilize reliably documented accounts and public records, which has led to many hours in archives, libraries and courthouses in West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Kentucky researching land grants, deeds, wills, letters and family genealogies; much time was also spent double-checking other authors’ citations. Published “family lore” accounts tended to be riddled with uncertainties and outright impossibilities and were therefore avoided unless the accounts were confirmed by other evidence. Even so, I expect that there are mistakes and misinterpretations in this work, and though the writing style may seem confident of the facts, I remain open to other lines of evidence that may present alternative views. I started this project a tabula rasa with no particular historical axe to grind other than a desire for an accurate portrayal based on objective data.
Court houses and public records are excellent sources for objective facts, but have a drawback in that they tend to narrowly focus on the activities of landowners who, in this case, have been mostly relatively wealthy Caucasian males (with some notable exceptions); this history would be much richer and would benefit greatly from an equal amount of detail concerning Native Americans, female family members, the slaves, the indentured servants and hired help, the subsistence farmers, renters, and other cultural groups who spent a significant part of their lives in the Terrapin Neck area, but whose thoughts and activities went unrecorded. I have included their stories when they could be found, but unfortunately most of the details of their lives can only be imagined or extrapolated from other sources in the region. (If you are aware of sources I could use, please let me know). The public records I used may also leave the impression that family life centered around the acquisition, disposal or debated ownership of various pieces of property, which is of course misleading. Again we are left with trying to imagine their daily activities, their hopes and dreams, and what brought joy, frustration and meaning to the families and individuals herein described.
While reading the following Eurocentric version of events keep in mind that for a significant 3
period of time after the arrival of Europeans, the most common faces on the property were not white. One of the nearly invisible groups in the historical record from about 1750 through at least the 1850’s is also likely to have been the largest – the enslaved people of African descent. Almost 40 percent of the people living in Virginia at the time of the first census in 1790 were held in slavery, while free blacks made up an additional 2 percent of the populace. Probate inventories and census records show that 10 to 20 slaves were based at the Springwood property at various times, and an equal number were associated with the RiverView Farm portion of the property. This suggests that on the property that has become the National Conservation Training Center, for about one hundred years the number of people living in chattel slavery outnumbered those of European descent by a ratio sometimes larger than 2:1. We get an occasional glimpse of their existence from probate inventories or tax assessments that include such information as first names, ages, and changes of ownership, but details of their families and experiences are mostly missing. That’s a lot of missing history, and I have tried to honor their lives by including their names whenever I could find them.
I wish to thank several people who encouraged me in this work, including Mark Madison, FWS historian at NCTC, Karel Whyte, Swearingen family genealogist, Don Wood and Galtjo Geertsema at the Berkeley County Historical Society who were generous in helping me locate maps and innumerable details, and André Darger, former NCTC course leader who provided a forum for some of this information in his Employee Foundations course; the course provided a strong incentive to try to get the details right. Jessie Hendrix and Elizabeth Hyman were among those who were generous in taking the time to check for accuracy, and were themselves significant sources of information. Any mistakes that remain are all mine.
A note about the maps: surveys and maps obtained from Galtjo Geertsema, surveyor from Martinsburg, WV, were very valuable. Further deed descriptions obtained in the Berkeley (WV) Jefferson (WV), Frederick (MD and VA), Washington (MD) County courthouses also were used to help decipher what sometimes amounted to a quagmire of distances and bearings used to describe new property boundaries, portions of which were just copied verbatim from earlier surveys, mistakes and all. By using both early and later surveys, and surveys from adjacent properties that described the same lines, I have a reasonable degree of confidence in the maps, especially those near present-day NCTC. The property boundaries for Thomas Swearingen’s heirs west of Shepherdstown in the enclosed 1770 map are based on Fairfax grants in the 1750s and 1760s and assume that parcels were not sold or added to in the meantime. The archives in the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort, Kentucky were invaluable in locating various land grants and other details related to the Revolutionary War period.
I consider this a work in progress and welcome new sources of information and further details on any of the topics I have written about.
Dan Everson
USFWS Biologist
email: dan_everson@fws.gov4
Disclaimer
The opinions and choices of material to include in this manuscript are those of the author. The US Government, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Conservation Training Center did not initiate, design or direct the writing of this manuscript and are not responsible for the accuracy, opinions or choice of materials. The author undertook this project solely to satisfy his curiosity, working on it intermittently during the occasional free moment of work time, as well as evenings and weekends over a several-year time span. As with any written history, the topics that are featured and the interpretation of events in this work are influenced by the biases and perceptions of the author, which include having grown up in a Scandinavian farming community in west-central Wisconsin. I have tried to be as inclusive as possible, so attention to certain cultural and socio-economic groups in this history should not be misconstrued as cultural myopia, but is instead an artifact of when, how, and for whom, public records were archived and indexed, as well as the tendency of our culture to follow and record the activities of limited members of a community or family. There are many voices missing in this work, not because these voices are unimportant or uninteresting, but because of the great difficulty, perhaps impossibility in many cases, of locating their words or accounts of their activities in the Terrapin Neck area. As I continue to search for information to fill some of these gaps, I make no claim to having written the history of the NCTC property, but merely a history that is at best incomplete, yet hopefully still interesting and useful. Tracking down and presenting the recorded history of the NCTC property has been a continual challenge, and has caused the author’s wife to use the word “obsessed” on several occasions. Tracking down and presenting the un-recorded history of the Terrapin Neck area, in order to capture those missing voices, is a challenge that may only be accomplished with your help. Copies of the manuscript have been made available by NCTC as a courtesy to guests and others who may be interested in local history. 5
A History of the National Conservation Training Center Property
Abstract
The following is a time line of significant events that have affected the land and ownership of the property now comprising the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC), with an emphasis on the period from early European settlement until shortly after the Revolutionary War. Included also are a few pages on 19th and 20th century history. Archeological evidence has shown that Native Americans utilized the site that became NCTC at least intermittently for more than 8000 years, and suggests that seasonal occupation ended about 700 years ago. European settlement of this area began in the 1720s, with newly arrived German settlers most recently from Pennsylvania, and other families especially from the Monocacy River valley in Maryland taking up lands along the western bank of the Potomac, then known as the Cohongoroota River. Some early European settlers in this area experienced many problems acquiring title to the land they occupied because of competing land claims of the Hite family and the Northern Neck Proprietary of Lord Fairfax. Two young Swearingen brothers, members of a slave-holding family with plantations in Maryland, acquired land near present-day Shepherdstown and on Terrapin Neck in the 1740s and 1750s, about twenty years after Europeans first began occupying the area. They first acquired patented property originally surveyed through the Hites and later also acquired grants through Lord Fairfax. Living on the frontier of a new country required an ability to run a self-sufficient plantation. They raised dairy and beef cattle, hogs, sheep and horses, grew corn, wheat, tobacco, rye and flax, and cultivated apple and pear orchards. They also must have raised other crops such as hemp and various other grains, fruits and vegetables commonly grown at the time, both as cash crops and to feed themselves and their slaves. Thomas Swearingen ran plantations, a mill near Scrabble and a ferry service across the Potomac, while Van Swearingen was a sheriff, militia leader, and owner of the plantation that became NCTC. The Swearingens were intimately involved with the political, military and ecclesiastical issues of the day, particularly at local and regional levels. Their period of time here was a turbulent one, both locally and throughout the colonies, characterized by over 40 years of strife beginning with the French and Indian War in the 1750s, with various family members engaged in military struggles through the 1790s. Some of the Swearingen property and wealth was lost after the Revolutionary War because of an ancient lawsuit between competing land claims. The 1790s were years of transition, with deaths and lawsuits bringing about changes in land ownership in the Terrapin Neck area, though the Swearingens continued to run a plantation later known as RiverView Farm - now the western section of NCTC - until the Civil War. The eastern section of the NCTC property, referred to as the Springwood estate in this document, became part of the wealthy Shepherd family holdings at the beginning of the 19th century; they retained it for about a century. Parts of the original Swearingen estate were consolidated into a single property again in the early 1940s by the Hendrix family. A member of this family sold the property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in March of 1992. 6
A note about names:
Several of the family names prominent in this history have been standardized to a common spelling. John Van Meter’s name in other publications and documents may be spelled in various ways including Jan Van Metre, Van Meteren, Vanmater and Vanmetre. Joist Hite usually spelled his name Jost Heydt, but records may show Joost Heyd and other combinations. Swearingen may appear as Swaringen, Sweringen, VanSwearingen and other phonetic characterizations.
For the sake of simplicity I have referred to the western portion of the NCTC property as RiverView Farm and the eastern portion as Springwood throughout the document. It should be understood that both these names are of relatively recent vintage: RiverView Farm first appears on a deed in 1896, and Springwood is probably mid 20th century. Springwood in the past has had other appellations including Mapleshade (1920s) and Shepherd’s Lower Farm (1870s-1890s). Nearby Shepherdstown has had other names such as Mecklenburg or Packhorse Ford which will occasionally appear in the text. Because property boundaries have changed over the years I also occasionally refer to now-adjacent properties as being part of RiverView Farm; for example the property now known as the Lost Drake Farm southwest of the NCTC entrance was the former home of Hezekiah Swearingen who eventually inherited the adjacent tract to the north that became RiverView Farm, which was largely developed by his son Van. The property now known as the Wild Goose Farm was also Swearingen property from 1828 to 1838. So to reduce confusion, in this document RiverView Farm will be used to describe those lands that were acquired by Hezekiah Swearingen from his father (who once owned both Springwood and RiverView Farm) in the late 18th century and remained with his heirs through the Civil War, while Springwood refers to the eastern portion of NCTC held by the Shepherds from about 1807 to 1907 that now includes the campus and the Hendrix life estate. How - and perhaps why - the Shepherd family acquired the Springwood property in the 19th century is a major theme of the following compilation. 7
Time line of Events
Native Americans lived intermittently along the edge of the river they called the Cohongoroota for thousands of years. Riverbottom lands provided fertile soil for their fields of squash and corn, and the rolling limestone uplands supported plentiful resources including large herds of buffalo and elk grazing in the meadows amidst scattered patches of oak-hickory forest. Village locations changed frequently based on the availability of resources and competition with other groups. The latest evidence for a seasonal encampment at the site that became NCTC is dated at about 400 years before Europeans first explored the lower Shenandoah Valley. Among the enduring legacies of the people who once lived here are the beautiful names given to local creeks and rivers: Shenandoah, Antietam, Opequon, Tuscarora, Conococheague, Cacapon.
Chapter 1 Early Colonial Period
1649 - Forty-two years after British colonists first landed at the site they named Jamestown, the British monarch-in-exile Charles II felt it necessary to be generous. His father, King Charles I, had recently been beheaded for, among other complaints, defying parliament, and religious zealotry that included having the noses and ears cut off subjects who refused to join the Anglican Church. Now young Charles had been forced by the equally zealous Puritan Roundheads to take sanctuary in Scotland and then France. He would wait 11 more years for the Restoration of the Monarchy, but in the meantime he promised a large land grant in Virginia, later known as the Northern Neck Proprietary, to six noblemen friends because of their support of the Crown in those troubled times. One hundred fifty years later, people living on Terrapin Neck near Shepherds Town, Virginia, would have cause to regret this generosity.
The newly-promised Proprietary was to include all the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. Europeans didn’t have a clue as to where these rivers actually began, there being a vague notion at the time that the rivers had their headwaters in the Blue Ridge somewhere off to the west of the settlements on the coast. The exiled heir to the throne and his friends had no idea how much land had just been given away, provided of course that young Charles should ever re-establish the British monarchy. More than 80 years would pass before a commission in Virginia set out to find the head springs of the two rivers and thus determine the boundaries, it having become apparent in the meantime that the Potomac actually passed through the Blue Ridge at present-day Harpers Ferry and had its headwaters well to the west in the Alleghenies.
This type of land grant was not unprecedented - other colonial proprietors in the mid-Atlantic region included Lord Baltimore in Maryland and William Penn in Pennsylvania. In fact Lord Baltimore’s new proprietorship had been carved out of land originally promised to the Virginia colony, leading to frantic visits to the King and his court, as well as naval attacks in the Chesapeake Bay and several pitched battles between the competing British factions on several occasions through the 1650s. The British lords with interest in the New World competed for 8
high stakes - proprietors were given full governing rights inside their granted lands, and could make large amounts of money selling tracts of land to settlers. A settler interested in a plantation lifestyle could receive land by grant from the proprietor, and could then keep, sell, bequeath, or entail that land so long as they paid an annual quit rent per acre to the proprietor during the duration of their ownership. The colony of Virginia, on the other hand, was a Crown Colony, ruled by the current monarch in power, and administered through a Governor and Council in Williamsburg, Virginia. (The King originally did not rule over Virginia as Sovereign of England, but instead the colony was considered part of his feudal manor holdings, which meant he ruled over Virginia as a feudal lord, like the proprietors.) Lands granted by the colonial Council in Virginia, with the governor’s stamp of approval, became known as King’s Patents. Land speculators in Virginia who had been given Orders of Council for large tracts of land to sell and distribute, acting as middlemen, also offered another avenue for a settler to acquire a King’s Patent. The Virginia Council, as well as the Northern Neck Proprietary, and a number of large land speculators eventually operated land offices in Virginia from which settlers could acquire land. The Virginia Council had a strong interest in locating settlers on the margin of the colony both as a source of revenue through land sales and rents, and as a buffer to the wilderness and all its hazards, which explains their eagerness to give out large land grants to speculating middlemen on the periphery who could draw in those settlers.
It is unknown when the Virginia colonists first heard of the new proprietary, but no doubt the Virginians were dismayed at the prospect of losing control of yet another large tract of land, having already been forced to give up the northern portion of the Chesapeake Bay country to the Calverts and Lord Baltimore. The new Northern Neck Proprietary seems to have generated fewer violent sparks than when Maryland was created, perhaps because most of the land lay to the unknown west beyond the tidewater settlements, and there was not an immediate influx of new governing authorities marking boundaries and clamoring for resources. The relatively small number of settlers in Virginia generally stayed close to their tidewater plantations for many years because of fear of Indians, and the threat was real - some 350 colonists were killed by Indians in the Virginia colony in 1641 alone (Couper 1952).
1660 - Charles II returned triumphantly to England as King after the death of Oliver Cromwell. Many of his loyal followers had lost much of their property while he was in exile and responded by moving to one of the colonies across the Atlantic, and at least several were grateful for having been granted large tracts of land in the New World as partial compensation.
1685 - Joist Hite was born in Bonfeld, Germany, son of a local butcher and a member of the Protestant church; he will play a major role in northern Virginia history (Jones et. al 1979).
1690 - By this year deaths and marriages had transferred the bulk of the Northern Neck Proprietary in Virginia into one family of the British peerage, Lord Fairfax (who had acquired it through marriage to a Culpeper). Lord and Lady Fairfax lived on large castled estates in England; they would never see their Virginia lands. Nevertheless, Lord Fairfax did employ agents in the Virginia Colony to administer the Proprietary and to see that the local Virginia 9
Council did not infringe on his lands between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers as the Council handed out their own grants in the region. The Virginia Council often ignored the Fairfax claim to the land and gave out land grants within the disputed area anyway. At this time the Virginia Colony was selling frontier lands not only to individual settler families but also to land speculators, who provided a service by surveying the land and bringing in additional settler families. The land speculators, in tandem with their settlers, were required to survey parcels of land and have them recorded for the issuance of a patent by the Governor or Proprietor. There wasn’t always a strong distinction between the speculators and settlers because they often belonged to the same extended family. Once the governor issued a settler a patent, they then held a strong legal title to the land. In order to acquire a large land grant, land speculators were usually required to bring in a specified number of settlers to the colony by a specified deadline. The settlers then paid fees and rents to the large land speculators. The system necessarily meant that a lot of money traded hands; it also provided the potential for some of the middlemen to get rich, and created a strong financial incentive to attract settlers. Land patents from the Virginia Council and grants from the Fairfax Proprietary were mostly in the Coastal Plain and Piedmont areas of Virginia through the 1720's; the lower Shenandoah Valley on the western side of the Blue Ridge was largely unexplored before 1700, and will become the focus of the following narrative. Early Virginia history is replete with tales of European exploring parties setting out westward, walking up the moderate slopes of the Blue Ridge and gazing out over the Shenandoah Valley, supposedly uttering flowery phrases and waxing poetic over the lovely vision before them, followed by the congratulatory backslapping return with lusty tales of adventure describing hardships and toil for the ears of the more timid souls who had remained safely at home. You have to wonder, since a traverse of the Blue Ridge is hardly a Himalayan odyssey, if there were a few traders, trappers or Native Americans nearby thinking to themselves “big deal, my grandmother walks up there every week…”.
The rise of the tobacco plantation culture in the colonies, especially in Maryland and Virginia, required an ever-increasing pool of reliable labor. The European indenture system wherein a settler’s passage to the colony could be worked off over a period of years was not able to meet the demand for labor. Africans had first arrived in Virginia in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 individuals to Jamestown - with families, property, history, culture, hopes and dreams of their own - that were sold into servitude for supplies. At first their status was more similar to that of European indentured servants, with some of them eventually becoming business and property owners. Virginia law gradually over several decades disenfranchised Africans, changing their status into slaves; it wasn’t until 1662 that slavery was codified in Virginia statutes. By the 1690s large numbers of enslaved Africans began to be imported into the middle colonies. The majority of landowners were not slaveowners, and those that were often could afford only one or two slaves that worked alongside white family members. Most of the slaves in the colonies were concentrated on a relatively small number of very large plantations (Dufour 1994).
1693 - In Britain, the Fairfax family, who had acquired the rights to the Northern Neck Proprietary in Virginia, asked for and received confirmation of their Proprietary from the King. 10
They apparently hoped this would resolve once and for all who held title to the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers in that wild, uncivilized colony across the Atlantic. It didn’t.
1699 - A new system of land grants became available to immigrants coming into the Virginia colony, referred to as treasury rights. This allowed anyone to purchase land, 100 acres for 10 shillings. To retain ownership, an annual quit rent and occupation of the property was necessary.
This replaced the old system of acquiring land by bringing in settlers, known as head rights.
1702 - Robert Carter, in Williamsburg, Virginia, became the agent of Lord Fairfax. Until his death in 1732, he was particularly effective at controlling or at least lodging legal complaints (caveats) against infringements on Fairfax Proprietary lands. He eventually held all the important positions on the governing Council of the colony while at the same time acting as Fairfax’s agent. His tenacity may have tended to reduce settlement in the lower Shenandoah Valley because of the difficulties in acquiring a clear legal title to the land. He and other Fairfax agents managed to steer many land grants toward members of their own families - thus adding significantly to the Carter, Fitzhugh, and Lee family fortunes in Virginia.
1705 - The Virginia colony passed a law forbidding the granting of patents in excess of 4000 acres; exceptions to this policy were sometimes given to companies and individuals. To the north in Pennsylvania, William Penn’s Proprietary had now expanded to almost the Susquehanna River. Native American groups (at least those that were paid) tended to be more tolerant of the Pennsylvanian settlers because of Penn’s policy of purchasing land from the local tribes. The English settlers in Virginia and Maryland, on the other hand, were referred to by the natives as "Long Knives" because of their habit of acquiring land by force. At this time the French were exploring and settling the Ohio Valley, and the Spanish were increasing their settlements in Florida and along the lower Mississippi.
1709 - Joist Hite, born in Germany, crossed the Atlantic and settled in New York with a number of other Dutch and German families, including his father and stepmother. He had married Anna Maria Mercklin 5 years before, and had worked as a linen weaver before setting sail from Rotterdam with several other local families; Anna had given birth to two children but they hadn’t survived. Many history texts describe him then as a wealthy, distinguished businessman with the financial wherewithal and influence to organize and finance the journey to the New World for many families, and was supposedly even able to provide his own ships; the histories then go on to describe his inevitable continued success and prominence as a real estate entrepreneur in the New World. It would be interesting to see where this fable originated, as recent scholarship points to a more humble origin - he has been documented as crossing the Atlantic as one of a group of indentured servants who worked for a time at a failed business venture in New York. By 1714 he was apparently a landowner with a growing family living north of Philadelphia, and about 3 years later he owned a plantation and gristmill outside the present community of Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Philadelphia, and was doing some weaving on the side (Jones et al. 1979). His later efforts at administering a large land grant in the lower Shenandoah Valley of Virginia will prove to be a major chapter in the history of the land that has now become the National Conservation Training Center. In Britain, the Fifth Lord Fairfax died, leaving title to the bulk of the Northern Neck Proprietary in Lady Fairfax’s hand, though her Culpeper family members retained a percentage of ownership as well.
1719 - Lady Fairfax died. Her 24-year old son Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, became the sole Proprietor of the Northern Neck in Virginia. He owned only a 1/6 interest in the Virginia proprietary outright, the other 5/6 he held only for his lifetime. He had rather reclusive, taciturn bachelor tendencies, and often preferred to spend his time alone on his British estates rather than engage in the typical aristocratic functions of a young British peer.
Terrapin Neck
1720's - The debate over exactly when a permanent community in the Shepherdstown area first developed has not been resolved - some authors put the date as early as 1706, others 1719, others still later in the 1720s. If in fact Europeans lived in the area before 1720, they seem most likely to have been itinerant groups that stretch the definition of "community", since they seem not to
11
12
have built substantial cabins, churches, mills, or cleared extensive fields, or laid any claim - official or unofficial - to land or springs and water resources of the area; it’s possible that one or more small European groups lived near present-day Shepherdstown in the manner of the Native Americans who still established small temporary camps in the region at the time, perhaps trapping, hunting, trading and gardening to survive. In the early to mid-1720s there seems not to have been an established group of people willing to defend their claims to any large land holdings near present-day Shepherdstown, the evidence being the number of springs, creeks and rich bottom lands -the most valuable real estate- that remained to be claimed in the late 1720s by families such as the Van Meters, Morgans, Shepherds and others (these families, of course, may have purchased or bartered the rights to these water sources from earlier arrivals who didn’t intend to stay, though there is no evidence of this). So with due caution, the second half of the 1720s probably marked the arrival of the first long-term "settlers" into what became the Shepherdstown community. At the regional level, many of the early settlers coming into northern Virginia and northern Maryland were Germans most recently from the Lancaster and York areas of Pennsylvania. William Penn’s agents had been busy in the Rhine Valley of Germany attempting to lure settlers into Penn’s proprietary. After arriving by the shipload in Philadelphia and other ports, many of the newly arrived settlers stopped in the small established German communities in Pennsylvania such as York and Lancaster only long enough to ask for directions to the closest available land. Many of these settlers belonged to various sects of the Protestant faith seeking land and a place to practice free expressions of their faith, including Moravians, Quakers, Dunkers, and Friends. It is misleading in some respects to refer to them as "German", since many of them had spent only a short time in what was referred to as the Palatine area of Germany. Their Protestant faith had made them unwelcome in many parts of Europe, so they had sought refuge in the Palatinate and may have lived there less than a generation in many cases. William Penn’s agents no doubt found them an attentive audience. After negotiating the wilderness paths south out of Pennsylvania (Mason and Dixon would not begin marking the legal border between Maryland and Pennsylvania until 1763 – many at the time considered Lancaster to be in Maryland), and their arrival on the other side of the Cohongoroota River in Virginia near the river ford, a few groups may have set about building cabins and clearing a bit of land for pasture and crops. The first arrivals had no readily available system in place to acquire legal title to the land they occupied, and had to depend on other settlers’ willingness to recognize their "tomahawk rights", which refers to their method of marking property claims by blazing marks on the trunks of trees. New settlers would find it difficult to develop legal, cultural and social ties with Williamsburg and the other European-populated areas of Virginia because of the distance and lack of roads - therefore they were rather tenuously "Virginians" only in a narrow geographical context, and even that was debated for years until the leaders of the colonies agreed on which tributary constituted the main stem of the Potomac River. (Lawsuits debating the boundaries between Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania continued even up to the 20th century).
In a 1721 map made for Philomen Lloyd, the Secretary of the Maryland Colony, the area upstream of the mouth of the Monocacy River is described as “Potommeck above Ye Inhabitants” and shows the correct relative positions (and the present-day names) of the 13
Conococheague, Opequon, and Antietam creeks. An interesting map notation for an area near Opequon Creek about 8 miles west of NCTC near the present site of Bedington, West Virginia is “Opeckhon Creek: A Salt Soyl called ye Elk’s Licking Place. Great Droves of those Creatures resorting there to lick ye Earth”.
Settlement of the northern (Lower) portion of the Shenandoah Valley was given impetus in 1722 with the Treaty of Albany between Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Five Nations Indians (the Iroquois Confederacy, which included such groups as the Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Oneidas and Onandagas). The northern Indians agreed not to cross the Cohongoroota (Potomac), or the Blue Ridge, without a pass (only 10 passes to be issued at a time), upon pain of death or slavery. This treaty clearly made piedmont Virginia and Maryland just to the east of the Blue Ridge very desirable for settlement by recently-arrived Europeans, allowing greater European familiarity with the Shenandoah Valley on the other side of the long ridge. Indians were still allowed to travel through and otherwise utilize the Shenandoah Valley along their Warrior’s Path, which extended from New York to the Carolinas. The powerful Iroquois, centered in New York, had fought tenaciously for many years with other tribes in eastern North America for control over trade and other resources, and seem to have benefited from this treaty at the expense of some of the other tribes under their “protection” in the mid-Atlantic region, a strategy they pursued at various councils through the early 1750s. The northern Iroquois negotiators, who claimed to speak for all the Native American groups in the area including the Shawnee and Delaware (Lenni-Lenape*), apparently were willing to sacrifice (for a fee) a large land area for which the Iroquois had a very tenuous claim even from the Native American perspective. The treaty still allowed the Iroquois Confederacy to outfit and send warparties south through the Shenandoah Valley to continue their long-term conflict for control over several southern tribes including the Cherokee and Catawba. European travel in the region was not constrained by any language in the treaty. (* Delaware is from a British family name (Lord De La Warr) given to a river by the colonists, and then to the native people living nearby; Lenni-Lenape is what the tribe living in the Delaware River Valley called themselves.)
1725 - Charles Mounts Anderson, early explorer and operator of an Indian trading post on the Monocacy River near present-day Frederick, Maryland, was asked by the Maryland Assembly to provide a meeting place at his home for a council with a local Indian tribe. A John Powell was charged with inviting the Indians, and was "to go to Shuano town on Potomack, commonly called Opessa’s Town”; he was provided calico shirts and scarlet worsted stockings to be used as gifts to help induce the Indians to attend. The purpose of the proposed council was to negotiate with the Shawnee over returning slaves they had been harboring - but the Shuano (Shawnee) Indians chose not to show up on the appointed date, and Anderson’s partner Israel Friend was sent back to invite them to visit Annapolis instead (Archives of Md, vol. 25 p 443, 451). Opessa’s Town is now called Oldtown, located on the Potomac River between Hancock and Cumberland, Maryland, about 50 miles west of Shepherdstown. Charles Anderson had been in the Indian trading business since at least 1712, when he was recorded as entering into a lawsuit in Cecil Co, Maryland, with the widow of Indian trader Jacque LeTort, who lived at the Indian town at Conestoga, Pennsylvania (see Diller, n.d). Charles Anderson had been involved with negotiations over these same slaves since at least 1722 when the Maryland Council, hearing he 14
was in Annapolis, had asked him to go to the Shuano town (Oldtown) with gifts of coats and socks, and a promise of a "chain of friendship" for "so long as the sun and moon shall endure", especially if they would give the slaves back (Md Archives, vol 25, p. 395).
1726 - John Van Meter and his family purchased a 200 acre tract from Lord Baltimore near present-day Frederick, Maryland in the Monocacy River valley settlement known as Monocacy Hundred. The Van Meters were of Dutch origin, and had been in the Dutch colonies near New York and New Jersey for several generations; at least some of them were slave owners, as John’s grandfather mentioned 6 slaves in his will (K. B. Rogers, n.d.). All of John’s children were born on land the family owned in New Jersey, but the family had moved west to Maryland by the early 1720s. John, 43, and occasionally his younger brother Isaac were itinerant traders in the Monocacy River valley, and they no doubt had some contact with Charles Anderson’s Indian trading post there. Their father, nicknamed “the Dutchman on the Hudson”, had also been a widely traveled Indian trader and supposedly had encouraged his sons to settle in the upper Potomac region he had once explored. The Van Meters were likely well acquainted with a fellow Dutch family named Swearingen living nearby at the time. The Van Meters certainly became acquainted with another family living in the neighborhood - John’s daughter Elizabeth would marry Thomas Shepherd in a few years, and the young couple would, with Elizabeth’s parents and several of their neighbors and relatives, soon take up land on the other side of the Cohongoroota River near a ford along the old wilderness trail, which the Shepherds years later developed as “Shepherdstown”.
May of 1726 marked the death of Thomas Swearingen, a slave-owning plantation owner living not far from the Potomac River near present-day Chevy Chase, Maryland (a northern suburb of Washington DC). He left behind 3 daughters – Margaret, Luranna, and Mary – and two sons including Thomas, who was 18, and Van, who was a young lad of 7. All the children were bequeathed land in the will: Margaret and Luranna each received 40 acres of “Hills Choys”, Mary received 96 acres of “Swearingens Pasture”, Thomas received 70 acres of “Forest”, and young Van received 70 acres of “Forest” and 20 acres of “Hills Choys”. Van Swearingen will become a major focus of the rest of this narrative.
1727 - Sometime this decade a small number of German immigrants and others from colonies in Maryland and New Jersey may have begun forming a community near Pack Horse Ford on the Virginia side of the Cohongoroota River, along the old wilderness trail that had been used for thousands of years by the native Americans, located a mile or so south of the land later developed by the Shepherds. These first Europeans left few traces of their time spent here, vague church records, explorer’s accounts and uncertain graves being the bulk of the evidence (see Dandridge 1910, Bushong 1941). There are records of Europeans exploring this area before 1729, though it may be stretching it a bit to call them a community before about 1730. Within a few years land sales and legal actions recorded at Virginia courthouses would provide better documentation of these and perhaps later arrivals, including the Morgans, Shepherds, Weltons and Van Meters. The Native Americans had not been forced to give up their use of the Shenandoah Valley at this time, by either violence or treaty, but the Europeans apparently felt 15
that the small numbers of Natives who traveled through the area did not present enough of a menace to keep them from settling there. The Natives were getting anxious, though: in a letter to the authorities in Maryland complaining of white incursions near the Cohongoroota (Potomac) in 1731-32, several Indian representatives of the Five Nations, including one Capt. Civility, specifically mentioned that they had sold land only to Israel Friend, the trading partner of Charles Anderson, near Antietam Creek on the eastern (Maryland) side of the Cohongoroota near Pack Horse Ford (Md Archives vol. 28, p.10-11). They considered any other whites settling in the area to be trespassing and urged the Maryland authorities to stop the surveying of property.
Among those possibly “trespassing” was 19-year-old Thomas Swearingen, who apparently made a claim for 115 acres of land on Little Antietam Creek, south of present-day Sharpsburg and Keedysville Maryland, dating from on or before Nov. 1727 in what is now Washington County Maryland. He patented this property on June 12, 1734 (website for a map of the location: midatlantic.rootsweb.com/MD/washington/plats/platmap.html). The property, later known as part of a much larger tract called Fellfoot owned by Tobias Stansbury of Baltimore, was purchased by Stansbury from Thomas Swearingen and his wife Sarah in the 1750s (Fred.Cty Md DB E, p433). This is the first record indicating that the Swearingens from near present-day Chevy Chase were interested in a new plantation further north in Maryland on the western side of the Blue Ridge, again located only a few miles from the Potomac. (A few other locally-prominent families such as the Chaplines made the same journey from tidewater Maryland at the same time).
1728 - Peter Beller and his wife, likely recent German immigrants, were baptized in a German religious community near Lancaster, Pennsylvania after helplessly watching their young daughter die (Klein 1926). They would soon be migrating further southwest to the colonial frontier beyond the Blue Ridge. (This may be a different Peter Beller than the one who eventually owned NCTC property, but the timing and circumstances seem right. There was also a Peter Bellar who had owned, prior to 1712, the same piece of property north of Philadelphia later purchased by Joist Hite [ Phil Deed Book F, Vol 2, p. 48]).
1729 - Brothers John and Isaac Van Meter, explorers and traders from the Monocacy River valley in Maryland (Isaac and his family mostly remained in New Jersey at this time) built a cabin about 2 miles west of present-day Shepherdstown, West Virginia near where Route 45 crosses Rocky Marsh Run. They had spent some time in the last several years making contacts with authorities in Virginia about acquiring a large land grant, which included talks with Robert “King” Carter, representing Lord Fairfax and the Northern Neck Proprietary. They no doubt agonized over who held the rightful claim, the Virginia Colony, or Lord Fairfax in Great Britain? John Van Meter became the Constable of Monocosie Hundred in Maryland in 1729, a position he would hold intermittently through 1734, suggesting that his Virginia cabin was a temporary dwelling at first. The Virginia cabin site eventually became his home in the mid-1730s and became part of a patented property of over 1700 acres that included most of the watershed of the spring-fed creek now known as Rocky Marsh Run. It’s interesting to note that John, who could presumably pick out the most desirable property in the entire area, deliberately picked out the wettest, marshiest site around, and for years his tract was referred to as the Van Meter Marsh patent. (Homeowners now living in this area are occasionally the subject of local newspaper 16
articles during wet years – the intermittently marshy aspect of the landscape has apparently become less desirable in recent years, and some would prefer that the perennial surface water, so attractive to the Van Meters, drained a little faster to the Potomac through the now-channelized sections of creek.) Before moving full time to Virginia, Van Meter lived in what was known as the Monocasie Hundred which encompassed an area extending from the mouth of the Monocacy River where it joined with the Potomac up into Pennsylvania, including the area now known as Frederick, Maryland. After writing a letter to authorities complaining of “abuses” by the settlers in Monocacie Hundred, Constable Van Meter was given a couple of deputies, including one Joseph Mounts (Tracy and Dern 1987).
Back in Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, Robert Carter unsuccessfully petitioned the King via the Virginia Council to stop issuing patents within or near the Fairfax Proprietary until the boundaries were determined. The colonists still didn’t know where the headwaters of the Potomac or Rappahannock Rivers were, and so couldn’t determine what lands were within the Proprietary; the Virginia Council perhaps saw a benefit in remaining obtuse about the boundary location for the time being. Many in Virginia preferred to interpret “head” of the Potomac as describing the head of navigation, which would make the Proprietary much smaller by including land only in the coastal plain. Fairfax, of course, preferred the “first fountain” definition.
Chapter 2 European Settlement of Terrapin Neck
1730 - On June 17, the Van Meter brothers, after petitioning the Virginia Council for land grants for themselves, their many children and diverse relatives, were successful in acquiring a combined 40,000 acre grant from the colonial government of Virginia in the lower Shenandoah Valley. Thirty thousand acres, or ¾ of the total, were to be located between the “Sherando” and “Operkin” (Shenandoah and Opequon) rivers - clearly well within the Northern Neck Proprietary also claimed by Lord Fairfax. The brothers together were required by the Council to settle themselves and 30 other families within two years to retain title to the acreage. Note that they were not given all the land between the Shenandoah and the Opequon, nor were they required to mark out a single large block of land. On the contrary, they were allowed to mark, survey and sell the best portions to themselves, their friends, and their new settler families, usually in parcels amounting to several hundred acres, until they eventually accumulated 40,000 acres. In short they were given the sole rights to a two-year hunting license for 10,000 acres within the forks of the Shenandoah River (an area including the heavily wooded upland called Massanutten Mountain, part of the George Washington National Forest, and the flatter land near Front Royal), as well as 30,000 acres bounded by the Shenandoah, Potomac and Opequon rivers. This also meant, of course, that the Van Meters had to be nervous about claiming ownership to land that someone may have already been living on and was willing to defend – other occupants, if any, could decide for themselves whether to purchase a legal title for their claim from the Van Meters during this two-year period. Other potential settlers could also approach the Virginia Council to gain title after the two years were up, and they probably also had to consider dealing with Lord 17
Fairfax’s agents since Fairfax considered this part of his Proprietary (the text of the Van Meter grant is included in the appendix). John Van Meter, in his rounds as Constable of the Monocosie Hundred in Maryland, no doubt informed all his friends and neighbors of his new land grant, and the wonderful land they could acquire from him across the river in Virginia. The Van Meters and the Virginia Council were fully aware that Fairfax held a prior claim to the land, well before the petition was heard; in fact, in later legal proceedings, Fairfax pointed out that the Van Meters had approached him first for a grant (Couper 1952). In ignoring the Fairfax claim the Virginia Council and Governor Gooch probably considered it an opportune time to try to solidify their own claim, particularly since the neighboring colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania were expanding rapidly. As settlers pushed westward in a search for land, legal boundaries in the colonies at this time were routinely redrawn, ignored or became obsolete. In the 40 years that the Proprietary had been in Fairfax hands, the Fairfax family had never shown any inclination to travel to the colony to personally administer their claim, and it was probably fairly easy to ignore the Fairfax agents when they started to complain. True to form, Robert Carter issued a caveat for Fairfax at the time that the Van Meter petition was being considered. (To keep the Fairfax claim alive, Fairfax’s agent Robert Carter issued the first Fairfax grant in the Shenandoah Valley to a member of the Carter family 3 months later on September 22.)
The Van Meter brothers weren’t alone in their petition for land in the lower Shenandoah Valley, as other land speculators acquired grants within the Fairfax Proprietary this year as well. The Virginia Council granted land on the west side of the Opequon River in Virginia to Quaker leaders Alexander Ross and Morgan Bryan with similar requirements for bringing in new settlers. Quakers from Pennsylvania and Maryland soon began packing up and moving to Virginia. The Quaker leadership in 1738 admonished them “to keep a friendly correspondence with the native Indians, giving no occasion for offence” and to emulate William Penn’s example by always purchasing new settlements from the natives. They were further reminded that the province of Virginia had “made an agreement with the natives to go as far as the mountains and no farther, and you are over and beyond the mountains, therefore out of that agreement; by which you lie open to the insults and incursions of the Southern Indians...(Kercheval 1833)
Jeremiah York was perhaps the first known permanent settler in the vicinity of present-day NCTC. Tax records show he had been living in Chester County, Pennsylvania since about 1718 (O’Dell 1995), but about 1730 he disappears from the tax rolls there. Records indicate a Jeremiah York living in the Monocosie Hundred near Pipe Creek north of present-day Frederick Maryland in the early 1730s (an old bible record indicates a son born there in 1732), but if this is the same York, he is not listed in the tax list of 1733, suggesting a possible date for his move west into Virginia, about the same time as the Van Meters and others from the Monocosie Hundred. He claimed the land within a tight meander of the Cohongoroota several miles north of Packhorse Ford that would soon be called Terrapin Neck. Old friends and neighbors of York from Pennsylvania settled nearby on the Maryland side of the river, including Samuel Finley and the Alred family; the Yorks and Alreds would later settle in North Carolina together as well. 18
1731 - Joist Hite, 45 years old, having listened to the tales of the open lands in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to sell his property near Philadelphia to a John Pawling for £540 pounds. The Van Meter’s large land grant in Virginia greatly interested him, so Hite and about 16 other families packed up and headed south through the wilderness, widening the old Indian trails where necessary to make room for their heavily laden wagons. He and the Van Meters soon struck a deal (some genealogical sources have described Joist as either John Van Meter’s cousin or nephew; other documents suggest they were just well acquainted), and the Van Meter brothers sold him their claim to the 40,000 acres granted them the previous year, possibly because of nervousness over the existing dispute over title, or maybe it had been their plan to sell out all along. John Van Meter was perhaps tired of the added “abuses” that inevitably came along with the administration of land grants and settlers, and was happy to be relieved of the burden, especially when it put money in his pocket. He was nearly 50 years old and had been moving west to the frontier his entire adult life. His younger brother and partner Isaac had decided to stay in New Jersey rather than settle on his grant in Virginia, so Isaac wasn’t going to be much help. (According to fairly well documented family lore, Isaac later returned to Virginia and was killed by Indians during the French and Indian War in 1757.) The land the Van Meters had already patented was also sold to Hite 3 years later in 1734, though they retained and lived on several large parcels in the Shepherdstown area. Hite also had an additional 100,000 acre grant in the Shenandoah Valley issued to him by the Virginia authorities that he shared with a group of partners. Hite already had a head start in attracting the required number of settlers to his land grants with the 16 families who had traveled with him from Philadelphia; they all had lived out of their wagons near the Van Meter cabin and Pack Horse Ford for a year while homes were built about 5 miles south of present-day Winchester on the upper Opequon. Joist and Anna Maria’s children were still fairly young at the time: John was 17, Jacob was 12, Isaac was 10, Abraham was 2, and Joseph was a newborn (Jones et. al 1979). Over the years the Hite and Van Meter families would develop close ties from numerous marriages.
In addition to settling a specified number of families, Hite and his partners were required to have the 140,000 acres surveyed by December 25, 1735 to retain control of the grant, the Virginia Council having granted a two-year extension to the original Van Meter Orders of Council. Thus began the anxious process of locating and surveying land and finding settlers to reach their quota. After setting up a land office (and operating an inn) south of present-day Winchester, Virginia, in addition to trying to attract new settlers and buyers into their area, the Hites began surveying and selling property to people in the Valley who were already living there, offering a title and a bond on a scrap of paper should the title ever proved defective. In return, the settlers had to pay a base fee, usually £3 pounds per hundred acres (which was six times the price charged by the Northern Neck Proprietary or the Virginia Council), and an annual “quit rent”. This may have been unpopular with some settlers, who probably were familiar with the Fairfax claim and were waiting to work with Fairfax for title. It must have been a bit of a shock to those already living in the area for a newcomer like Hite to appear in their midst holding an exclusive claim to 140,000 acres granted by the Virginia Council, and asking them to purchase the property they lived on from him. The Hites apparently were not particularly well organized and acted more in the manner of traveling land “peddlers”. Lord Baltimore in Maryland and William 19
Penn in Pennsylvania also considered this area as a possible expansion of their grants, and most of the settlers had actually come from those colonies. It would take a great leap of faith to buy land from the Hites. On the other hand, the Hites were in the neighborhood, the settlers could receive what looked like a bona fide title to the land without traveling to Williamsburg, they could pick and choose from among the choicest properties without regard to size or shape, and they were offered a form of title insurance. If a settler also happened to dislike the feudal Lords of Great Britain and their propensity to hand out property to relatives and privileged favorites, a fellow immigrant settler like themselves may have been seen as a more worthy person to conduct business with. Unfortunately, it was later found that the Hites and their partners kept poor records and conducted many shady transactions, including the recording of poor or fictitious surveys, the erasing of names on documents, and the like. Many of their land transactions were little more than a verbal barter of various goods. It was found later that fewer than a third of their supposed buyers actually lived on one large grant. It should be noted that the Hites were not particularly unusual in this regard, many other colonial land speculators had similar problems and solutions to them (Couper 1952).
1732 - Robert Carter, Fairfax’s agent in Virginia, died. Fairfax lost an influential and powerful ally within Virginia’s governing Council, though in fact Carter was a mixed blessing, having enriched himself and his heirs with land in the Northern Neck, and leaving administration of the Proprietary in some disarray with his passing (see Brown 1965). At one point, Robert Carter had amassed over 330,000 acres and owned about 1000 slaves (Wiencik 1988, p.13).
Nearer the head of Chesapeake Bay, Lord Baltimore and the Calverts took note of the tide of immigrants coming out of Pennsylvania looking for land. The Treaty of Albany with the natives notwithstanding, the leaders of the Maryland colony, “being desirous to increase the number of honest people within our province”, offered land on very good terms between the Potomac and Susquehanna Rivers in order to capture some of the immigrants heading south into Virginia. A family could get 200 acres for free, with quit rents waived for three years, while single men or women could get 100 acres under the same terms (Md Archives vol. 28, p25-26). The measurement standard for honesty wasn’t mentioned, but probably had something to do with not being an Indian or squatter.
1733 - Lord Fairfax, still in Great Britain, petitioned the King to stop the colony from issuing grants within his proprietary, and to finally! conduct a survey for a legal description. This was granted. To ensure that this ruling would not be ignored, Lord Fairfax decided to deliver the text of the decree himself by visiting Virginia - that wild backwater colony across the Atlantic - for the first time. Unfortunately for the later settlers on Terrapin Neck, he didn’t arrive in Virginia until two years later.
1734 - A young Thomas Swearingen and his wife Sarah sold 68 acres, “part of a tract of land called Forrest lying in Prince George County” he had inherited from his father several years before (O’Dell 1995). It’s unknown if he was thinking about life in Virginia at this time, or whether he was living on his now-patented Fellfoot property south of present-day Keedysville on 20
the Little Antietam, but those new grants available across the river in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia were undoubtedly being discussed by many young men in Maryland.
This year the first Hite survey near Terrapin Neck was conducted. On May 30, surveyor Robert Brooke surveyed an 834 acre tract on the Cohongoroota (Potomac) River adjacent to Terrapin Neck between Shepherd Island and the mouth of Rocky Marsh Run (then known as Jones Mill Run). This was surveyed for three partners--Charles Anderson, Indian trader and negotiator from the Monocacy settlements in Maryland, Joseph Mounts, deputy of Constable Van Meter in Maryland, and Josiah Jones, who also had another 164-acre survey in his name alone a few miles upstream “being in the first large bottom below the mouth of Opeckon Creek” (copies of surveys are at Berkeley County Historical Society’s Belle Boyd House in Martinsburg, WV). Jones had lived there long enough to have already built a road and at least started construction on a mill near present-day Scrabble just west of NCTC. The presence of this mill and several others soon underway in the area about the same time suggests that settlers and grain fields were already becoming common. Anderson, Mounts and Jones probably had claimed this parcel several years before expecting to buy it from their old friends the Van Meters, who were setting up operations on a 1,786-acre parcel several miles to the south along the marshy upper reaches of what was then called Jones Mill Run, but the Van Meters had instead sold out to Joist Hite 3 years before. This was a case where the Hites surveyed 834 acres that were already claimed, and then sold the occupants the land and provided a title bond in case the title should ever prove defective (Hyman 1996).
Anderson, Mounts and Jones had moved into a wild country that still included significant numbers of bison, elk, bear, beaver, wolves, cougars - and Native Americans who traveled frequently through the area along their ancient trails. Much of the lower Shenandoah Valley to the west of Terrapin Neck was a prairie with scattered woodlots; larger woodlands tended to be in the vicinity of rivers and streams and along the ridges bordering the Valley. The rich limestone soils of Terrapin Neck would have tended to grow a mixed oak-hickory forest cover very quickly barring any significant disturbance, just as it does today (the woodland around the NCTC campus was an open pasture in the 1940s!) What did Anderson, Mounts and Jones find so attractive when they claimed this property? You can get some idea of what the Terrapin Neck area looked like by examining the text of their 1734 survey:
1734 Survey near Terrapin Neck
Surveyed for Charles Anderson, Josiah Jones, and Joseph Mounts 834 Acres of Land Beginning at a Walnut Tree Standing at the Mouth of the Said Jones Mill Creek and on the West Side Cohongolooto Riv. And Thence down the Meanders Thereof 413 Poles to a wt. Oak opposite to an Island. Thence on the high land round the Several courses following Viz. So 40 po: to a Hicory. S 38 E 80 po: to a forked wt. Oak. So 26 po: to a large Hicory. S 40 W 183 po: to a bla. oak. N 60 W 46 to a bla. Oak. N 72 po. to a wt. oak on a knowl. N 70W 72 to a bla. Oak. S 50 W 88 to a bla. oak. S 70 W 74 to a large w. Oak. N 75 W 62 po. to a bla: Oak. S 62 W 80 po: to a wt. Oak. S 25 W 80 to a Locust Tree. N 70 W 19 po: to a Hicory. West 66 po: to a wt. Oak by a Spring. S E 80 po: to a wt. oak. NW 26 pole over the Mill Branch to a Walnut Tree beyond a Meadow. N35 E 40 po: to a Hicory. N 20 E 240 to a wt. Oak. And Thence N 40 W 230 pole to the Beginning This 30th day of May 1734.
Rob’t Brooke 21
The island referred to above is now known as Shepherd Island, the Cohongoloota (various spellings) refers to the original name of the Potomac River, and Jones Mill Creek is now known as Rocky Marsh Run. A pole is 16.5 feet. Note that these same tree species are still commonly found on NCTC property. The Berkeley County Historical Society recently placed the “Jones Mill” site on the National Register of Historic Places - today a sign marks the site near present day Scrabble. The eastern portion of this 1734 patent is now occupied by NCTC.
The pattern seen in these early surveys shows that the new settlers, who could still pick from among the choicest properties, chose sites that contained a spring or stream, had access to river transportation routes, and probably had a few open areas for establishing crops. The text of the actual grant from Governor Gooch gives several other descriptive clues including “white oak against an island a little below the ford and running thence into the woods”, and “red oak in barren ground” (a meadow) located on the hilltop area east of the present-day NCTC entrance. Open areas were attractive if the soils were adequate for crops, but the new owners would have wanted plenty of trees nearby for building cabins, barns and other structures, as well as for firewood. The trees in the above survey were not likely part of a continuous closed-canopy oak-hickory forest, but perhaps were contained within thinly scattered woodlots, or along the edges of larger forest patches that were growing in the bottomlands. Fire, and grazing by herds of elk and buffalo were likely the primary means of retaining open sites on the rich soils near Terrapin Neck prior to - and during - the settlement by Europeans. The strange shape of the Anderson, Mounts and Jones survey shows their strategy of minimizing the amount of land they had to pay for, but maximizing the land area that they could utilize, by acquiring the water resources- including all the major springs- in the area. Another settler was unlikely to take up land next door and begin complaining about cattle trespass and wood removal unless there was a reliable source of water available. (This was still a common strategy used by settlers in the American west in the 19th century as well; by claiming the 160 acres around a spring, homesteaders could potentially have at their disposal many thousands of acres of semi-arid land). The 834-acre tract was patented the same year by Richard Poulson, Mounts and Jones, who within several years began subdividing and selling portions of it. (Richard Polson is listed as a taxable in the Monocosie Hundred in 1733, another former Maryland neighbor of John Van Meter). The patent signed by Governor Gooch of the Virginia colony gave them a very strong legal claim of ownership to the property; they had achieved the goal of many of the early settlers by acquiring a patented tract of land. Why did Poulson take the place of Anderson on the patent? After all, Anderson’s Indian trading post partner Israel Friend had also taken up land nearby along both sides of the river south of present-day Shepherdstown, probably in the 1720s. (Friend’s title to the Maryland land apparently came from several generous Indian chiefs who considered him their friend - see Diller, undated. Thomas Swearingen would be executor of Friend’s will in 1749). Anderson and Israel Friend were both descended from a Swedish Lutheran colony - New Sweden - along the Delaware River. And since Anderson’s middle name was Mounts, one can assume he was closely related to deputy Joseph Mounts, one of the other patentees. (A Christopher Mounts, also related, had acted as an Indian interpreter for the Maryland Council back in August of 1700, further evidence that the Mounts and Anderson families had had several generations of frontier interactions with Native Americans, and may have derived a substantial portion of their incomes from these relationships - Md Archives v25, p.104). Anderson may have been nervous over the
22
Hite / Fairfax land dispute, and perhaps an agrarian lifestyle was ultimately unsuitable to someone who had spent so many years as an Indian trader on the frontier, and land speculation was his only real interest in the Virginia property. It could also have something to do with the fact that Anderson was in the Orange County, Virginia “gaol” by September 1735 for the murder of David Hopkins (O’Dell 1995), the charges brought by one Morgan Morgan and several other prominent early settlers in the area.
23
Robert Brooke completed several other surveys for the Hites in the area the same year (copies of these surveys are located at the Berkeley County Historical Society’s Belle Boyd House in Martinsburg, WV). In April, he surveyed 210 acres for Richard Morgan just north of present-day Shepherdstown. (This parcel was purchased by Van Swearingen 10 years later, and Thomas Swearingen, Jr. would eventually marry Morgan’s daughter). Brooke also surveyed a tract for a Welton in the same area. Later in October Brooke came back and surveyed 222 acres for Thomas Shepherd and his new wife Elizabeth Van Meter (who was related to the Hites - a relationship that likely played a factor in later legal proceedings on Terrapin Neck), to which Shepherd added a gristmill and sawmill some time later. Twenty years later part of this tract would be laid out into the town lots of Mecklenburg (Shepherdstown). The Morgan, Welton and Shepherd families, all of Welsh origin, had divided up and were utilizing the water resources of what is now referred to as Town Run and its small upstream, spring-fed tributaries, one of which begins in present-day Morgan’s Grove Park.
Where Are the Native Americans?
Archeological evidence on the NCTC property has shown that Native Americans utilized the site intermittently upwards of 8000 years. Dating of cultural artifacts suggests that regular occupancy of the site ended about 1300 A.D.; this matches a regional pattern characterized by pronounced changes in the distribution and subsistence strategies of earlier cultural groups often correlated with a climate phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age. The very few European accounts of the area between the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers in the 1720s indicate the area was utilized by small groups of natives for occasional seasonal subsistence including trapping, hunting, and the setting of fish traps to catch springtime sucker runs near present-day Harper’s Ferry. The I-81 corridor about 10 miles west of NCTC today roughly follows a major trail from New York to the Carolinas once used by various groups including the Lenni-Lenape, Shawnee and Catawba tribes; another ancient trail crossed the river at Pack Horse ford about a mile south of Shepherdstown. There seems not to have been any large or long-term settlements of Native Americans in the Shepherdstown area when Europeans began moving into the valley; the Maryland Council in the early 1700s spoke of Indian towns at Conestoga, Pennsylvania, the Shawnee town at present-day Oldtown, Maryland, a fort near Great Falls on the Potomac and several other tribes with towns around the Chesapeake Bay. A group of Tuscarora Indians, after fleeing the Carolinas sometime after 1715, lived at the site of present-day Martinsburg for a time (some accounts suggest they moved there after 1730), then left just prior to the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Note that these tribal names were often designations given to them by the Europeans – kinship patterns were complex and the natives themselves may have felt little connection to their assigned group.
Note: the community of Shepherdstown has been referred to by a number of names over the years. From the 1720s to the 1750s it was commonly referred to as Pack Horse Ford, in reference to the ancient river crossing about a mile south of the present community. For a time it was called Swearingen’s Ferry, after Thomas Swearingen started a ferry in 1755. After 1762 it was legally known as Mecklenburg, or Maclinborough, using a variety of spellings. By the time of the Revolutionary War it was more commonly referred to as Shepherds Town. This name was given official sanction by the state authorities in 1798 (Dandridge 1910).
The Swearingen brothers of Maryland, Thomas and Van, were likely exploring the Virginia side of the river at this time. The actual date of one or both of the brothers living full time on the Virginia side of the Potomac is unknown, but was most likely in the early 1740s. Thomas with 24
his wife Sarah bought and sold several properties in Maryland between 1732 and 1744. By 1734 Thomas had patented his Fellfoot property near Keedysville, Maryland, was married and 26 years old. He was 11 years older than his brother Van, who was then a 15-year-old teenager. Thomas was probably the dominant male figure in Van’s early life, as their father had died 8 years before. They likely had spent considerable time with their uncle Van Swearingen and his family who eventually established a home a few miles north of present-day Sharpsburg, not far from Thomas Swearingen’s Fellfoot property on the Little Antietam (young Van would marry his first cousin from this family later). The Swearingen family had been involved with Maryland colonial politics and land use issues for several generations. Their great-grandfather’s home in the then state capital of St. Mary’s City at the mouth of the Potomac River was used as a meeting place for writing many of the early Maryland laws; he had served as Sheriff for a time, and ran a lodging and coffee house for the colony’s leaders and merchants. The family was originally from Holland but became British citizens after arrival in the New World. Later generations were pragmatic in their choice of religious affiliation, abandoning Catholicism in the face of certain persecution by the colonial authorities of Maryland who wielded power through the Anglican Church. They eventually became moderately wealthy slave owners and undoubtedly were involved with the growing of tobacco on their lands. Each generation moved further up from the mouth of the Potomac River, and Van’s father and uncles had several plantations near present-day Washington DC and Frederick, Maryland (see http:/genforum.genealogy.com/swearingen/)
A busy wagon road from Conestoga, Pennsylvania to near present-day Winchester, Virginia was available for settlers to use by this time and soon afterward settlers could travel by wagon from Philadelphia all the way to the Carolinas on a road now known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. To cross the Potomac, they could choose to ford near present-day Williamsport, Maryland, or cross at Pack Horse Ford a mile south of Thomas Shepherd’s property when the water was low enough. A 1734 survey map in Virginia shows a ferry operating just south of Pack Horse Ford near the mouth of Antietam Creek on the Maryland side of the Potomac to Knott Island on the Virginia side, operated by a Samuel Taylor and used to haul iron ore for the new iron industry developing on or near Israel Friend’s property. This would soon become the thriving mining and iron-producing town of Antietam, built near the ore deposit near the mouth of the creek of the same name. The ferry here may have been available for the occasional settler or traveler wishing to keep their feet dry, but because the colony of Virginia required public ferry operators to be licensed by an act of the Virginia Assembly, it could not legally be used for public transportation. Without a license, authorities wouldn’t authorize new roads or require road maintenance to access it, important considerations if it was to be a money-making venture. The commercial possibilities for ferries were probably just beginning to be realized as hundreds of newly-arrived immigrants, both German and Scotch-Irish, were spreading out across Pennsylvania and traveling south along the wagon road west of the Blue Ridge down into the Shenandoah Valley. It has been estimated that 85% of the settlers moving into what became Frederick County, Virginia came from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and northern Maryland (O’Dell 1995). 25
1735 - In May Lord Fairfax finally arrived in the Virginia colony for the first time to deliver the decree from the King to stop issuing patents within his Proprietary. You can imagine the stir in Williamsburg and the thoughts of those who had purchased property within the Fairfax claim. It was one thing to ignore a Lord on the other side of the ocean, but a different thing entirely when he was in town with an entourage and a handful of documents bearing the King’s seal. Fairfax and his agents, including his recently-hired cousin William, immediately began to make plans for a survey of his Proprietary, and were inquiring about who had been given land within the Proprietary by the Council without their consent. The Van Meter/Hite grant was no doubt given prominent mention.
By July, mill owner Josiah Jones, one of the new owners of the patented tract near Terrapin Neck, was dead, leaving behind a wife and two children. His widow was ordered to appear in court to explain what she planned to do with her portion of the estate, including the mill. By September, Charles Anderson, one of the men named on the original survey for the property that became NCTC, was in jail for murder. The charges were eventually dropped, and Anderson moved to Oldtown further up the Potomac (O’Dell 1995). If slaves could find a refuge there with the Indians, perhaps he could too.
December 25 of this year marked the end of the Hite’s 4-year period for legally surveying land to include in their grant. It seems they tried to sneak in at least one more survey, as will be seen - the deadline had been extended several times in the past so they seem to have assumed that it would be extended again whenever the assembly got a chance to take up the issue.
1736 - In January, a Jonathon Simmons bought about 315 acres on the eastern side of the Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent (now the Springwood portion of NCTC that includes the campus) from Joseph Mounts for 30 pounds (Orange County DB 2, p. 385). Richard Poulson was living there at the time near the island (O’Dell 1995). It is unknown if Simmons lived on his new property after the purchase, but it seems likely.
A Hite survey of 1200 acres including all of Terrapin Neck east of and adjacent to Jonathon Simmons new place was (probably) surveyed on May 21; note that this took place 6 months after the Hite deadline. (A map of this survey is located for the year 1777 later in this document). A John Browning, living in what is now Cecil County, Maryland not far south of Philadelphia, received a title bond of 200 pounds from the Hites almost six months later on November 6th for this property, suggesting that the survey was not conducted at the behest of Mr. Browning, but was undertaken by the Hites on behalf of someone else or with the hope of eventually finding someone to buy it. According to Virginia law Browning was then legally required to settle on and improve Terrapin Neck to retain title - he never did, but instead seems to have lived in northeastern Maryland until he died there five years later. The surveyor hired by the Hites on Terrapin Neck was James Wood, surveyor for Orange County, and later there is some controversy over whether he surveyed the previous November 10, as was alleged in court later by the Hites (albeit with no supporting documentation), or whether the survey was conducted on the date it was written in his log book, which was the following May 21 (Hyman 26
1996). Wood went on to later become the first clerk of the new court in Frederick County, and is known as the founder of Winchester, Virginia.
Why was a non-resident John Browning able to purchase this 1200-acre tract on Terrapin Neck, rather than the people who were (probably) living there? Assuming that Jeremiah York actually did settle there after 1730 (he disappears from Pennsylvania records after 1729, and is mentioned as living on Terrapin Neck by at least 1741 in a later court deposition by Anthony Turner, who came to the area in 1740 as a boy - see Chalkley vol. 2, p.95), and making a further assumption that later repeated court testimony was correct in showing that Browning never settled Terrapin Neck, we can speculate about what may have happened. Jeremiah York was either 1) ignored by the Hites and not consulted about purchasing the land he had claimed - this seems unlikely because of the surveys done by Brooke in the area in 1734; York also left south-eastern Pennsylvania about the same time as the Hites, suggesting they were acquainted; or more likely, 2) York refused or did not pursue a Hite survey and patent, possibly because of the invalid survey after December 25, or knowledge of the Fairfax claim and Fairfax’s recent visit to Virginia, or some other misgiving or falling out with the Hites--and the Hites ignored York’s unofficial “tomahawk rights” and sold it to Browning despite it already being claimed and possibly occupied.
York was under no obligation to buy from the Hites; remember the Hites were allowed to distribute only a maximum of 30,000 acres between the Shenandoah and the Opequon rivers before a December 1735 deadline, which had now passed. York could very well have been waiting to pursue a grant directly from the Virginia Council and Governor Gooch, or from Lord Fairfax (he did receive a Fairfax grant for the land finally in 1751). He could bide his time on his property in the Monocacy Hundred near Pipestone Creek while the dispute was being settled. York and Browning undoubtedly knew each other, since both were from the area southwest of Philadelphia near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Ironically, many settlers left the border area between Maryland and Pennsylvania south of Philadelphia to escape uncertain property titles because of a boundary dispute between Lord Baltimore and William Penn, who both claimed the area. York was no doubt chary about committing his money to an uncertain property transaction by this time.
Even if York and others had begun negotiating with Hite over a land purchase, the issue was rendered moot--the Hites and other speculators and settlers were prevented from patenting any more property between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers because of a Fairfax lawsuit about this time. This lawsuit effectively eliminated any settler’s ability to acquire a clear legal title to land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers for at least the next 15 years.
Any contest between York and Browning over title to Terrapin Neck had to wait until the dispute between Hite and Fairfax was settled.
Progress was being made in describing the boundary of the Fairfax claim: the long-awaited search for the headwaters of the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, which would define the boundaries of Fairfax’s Northern Neck Proprietary, started in October and took about 9 weeks. 27
The commission had two “teams”, being composed of members representing both Fairfax and the Virginia Council. After completion of their arduous survey, another year was spent drafting their separate reports and maps.
John Van Meter had exasperations this year beyond those associated with land grants. Consider the deposition of his daughter at an Orange County Court hearing:
Mary Jones of this county declares that on 13 Oct Robert Yeldall was with Cornelius Newkirk, and Robert Yelddall entered the house of John Vanmetre and asked Vanmetre's wife for a botle he left there. The woman answered that she did not know of any botle. He began to swear and say he wood have his botle, except she would cheat him of it, and if she did, he did not mater it, they were knaves, they had swore the peace against James Davis, but he would stand by him, and that James Davis was able to drive them and all their generations, and if he wood stand by him, and after they had been gone a while, they came back to the house again. Robert Yelddall rod up to the house door, and the fore part of his horse entered the inside of the house, and John Vanmeter struck the horse back. Mary (M) Jones. Sworn before Morgan Morgan. (Orange County Judgments, 1736; James Davis was Van Meter’s son-in-law)
1738 - There were still some disputes between agents of the Virginia Council and the Fairfax team, so the results of the 1736 survey of the Proprietary were carried to England for a decision. Lord Fairfax agreed to honor all Crown grants issued by the Virginia Council within his Proprietary, including the Van Meter/Hite grants. The Terrapin Neck area was now included in the new county of Frederick, Virginia, there now being enough people in the lower Shenandoah Valley to warrant a court house of their own. Thomas Shepherd petitioned the Orange County, Virginia Court about this time, requesting to be discharged as “Constable Sherundo” as soon as Richard Morgan was sworn in his place (O’Dell 1995); in October Shepherd was also paid a bounty of 14 shillings for a wolf’s head by certificate of Richard Morgan (FC VA Court Journal, in Smyth 1909).
1739 - From the time of the first settlements in the New World, Europeans had a strong interest in American flora and fauna, with many wealthy gentlemen becoming avid collectors. By this year John Clayton of Gloucester County, Virginia produced the first taxonomic work from America, entitled Flora Virginica.
Joist Hite’s wife Anna Maria died at 52 years of age. Joist remarried two years later to Maria Magdalena, widow of his late friend Christian Neuschwanger. Their marriage included a prenuptial agreement specifying that she would provide love, obedience, cattle, money and other household stuff, in return for love, faithfulness and a home (Jones et. al 1979).
1741 - John Browning died at his home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (actually in the northeastern corner of Maryland, not far from Philadelphia); he was only 36 years old. He willed “his” 1200-acre Terrapin Neck tract in Virginia, sold to him 5 years before by the Hites, to three of his children: George, Nicholas, and Rosamond (she eventually married a William Keating). The Hite-Fairfax dispute was still unresolved at this time, but luckily for Jeremiah York, there are no records of John Browning attempting to settle or press his claim to Terrapin Neck prior to 28
his death, though he apparently considered it valuable enough to pass on to his children. It would be more than 40 years before his grandchildren suddenly took an interest in the property again, as will be seen.
1742 - Peter Beller, a German shoemaker, and his wife Catherine, with 6-year old son Jacob were living on the patented property Jonathon Simmons had purchased 6 years previously near Terrapin Neck (now the Springwood portion of NCTC). They eventually purchased the property from Jonathon Simmons - but the transaction wasn’t recorded at the courthouse until sometime after Simmons death four years later (FCDB 4, p.121-123). Beller may have lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with Dunkers around 1728, and followed a common German settlement pattern by continuing south into the Shenandoah Valley. There were other German Protestant groups settling just to the west on the other side of the Opequon River, an area off-limits to the Hites. Many German settlers preferred to continue on toward North Carolina in order to avoid the contentious land ownership disputes between Hite and Fairfax, and others (Couper 1952). Beller probably followed the typical German style of growing crops and animal husbandry, and likely had a cabin and a barn on the property that would become NCTC (see chapter in Kercheval 1833).
1743 - Van Swearingen, 24, married his 21 year old first cousin Sarah Swearingen. Sarah and her family had likely been living about 5 miles north of Terrapin Neck across the river in Maryland by this time, not far from Thomas Swearingen’s Fellfoot property south of Keedysville where Van had likely resided with his brother. Van and Sarah’s children eventually include:
Josiah - b. 28 March, 1744, oldest son
Rebecca - b. 2 Oct 1745 (she apparently died young)
Hezekiah - b. 7 Feb 1747
Luranna - b. 13 Nov. 1748
Drusilla - b. 29 Oct 1750
Thomas - b. 22 Nov 1752
Indian claims and complaints now being entirely ignored, settlement of the riverside land in Maryland across from Thomas Shepherd’s little community on the Potomac had been proceeding steadily for almost a decade, with several surveys already completed in the area now known as Ferry Hill. John Van Meter hired a survey for a 160 acre tract on the Potomac on the Maryland side of the river known as Pell Mell, which was just northeast of an adjacent tract downstream already surveyed and patented known as Antietam Bottom. Van Meter instructed the surveyor Joseph Chapline not to mark the western corner of Pell Mell - a black walnut tree on the riverbank - until after the lines of Antietam Bottom (patented in 1739 by John Moore) were known, so there wouldn’t be any controversy over the boundary. Unfortunately the walnut tree was never marked and sure enough it later caused a lot of controversy (Fred. Cty Md DB J, p 939, deposition of Joseph Chapline). 1744 - The newlywed Van Swearingens bought a 210 acre Hite-surveyed, patented tract from Richard Morgan for 110 pounds just north of the Pack Horse Ford community (now part of the Cress Creek development), which became their first family residence in Virginia (FCDB 1, p.116). The deed refers to Richard Morgan as a “Gentleman”, while Van is described as a “Farmer”. Van’s older brother Thomas would acquire an adjacent 478 acres from a Fairfax grant six years later, site of a conspicuous circle of raised earth used by the native Indians sometime in the past (Kercheval 1833), that later became known as the Bellevue property. Local folklore includes the tale of a Delaware Indian chief who was supposedly captured in the vicinity by enemy Catawba Indians, and buried alive near the spring on what became the Swearingen estate. The spring on the property spurts instead of flows, according to the tale, because of the beating heart of the buried chief (Heatwole 1995). Thomas established a ferry across the Potomac on this property by 1753, and eventually owned plantations on both sides of the Potomac River.
Although there are no records that describe the lifestyle of the new Swearingen plantations in Virginia, from descriptions of common practices at the time we can surmise that the children, many of the household chores, as well as the farm animals and crops, were all attended to by slaves. Tobacco and other crops and animals were grown and sold for profit, but much of the land--and much of the effort--would necessarily have been directed toward the growing of corn, wheat, hogs, sheep, and beef, which formed the basis of their subsistence. Tobacco was the currency of choice for paying taxes and fines for several decades in colonial Virginia. The financial system then prevalent has been likened to growing cash in your back yard. Landowners were assessed not only on real estate, but also on personal property such as horses and slaves. By Virginia law, planters were required to transport tobacco to a public inspection warehouse located in each county. Planters storing tobacco at the warehouse were given a receipt, which could be used as legal tender. Col. James Wood, clerk of the new Frederick County, in his Virginia Fee Book for 1744 recorded the Tobacco Assessment for selected settlers in the Terrapin Neck area as shown in Table 1.
Even though Van Swearingen was a “Farmer” and Richard Morgan was a “Gentleman”, Van appears to have nearly double the property worth taxing compared to Morgan, and even was assessed a higher fee than his neighbors the Van Meters. He owned only 222 acres, suggesting much of his wealth may have been in slaves and livestock. This list is missing some important people connected with the Terrapin Neck - Pack Horse Ford area at the time, such as Thomas Shepherd, who owned hundreds of acres of patented land, a gristmill and perhaps a sawmill by this time , and Thomas Swearingen, who
29
Table 1. 1744 Frederick County Tobacco Assessment
NAME Pounds of Tobacco Assessed
Peter Beller 50
Joseph Mounts 96
Richard Poulson 5
Van Swearingen 190
Jonathon Simons (Simmons?) ye infant 560
Israel Friend 268
John and Jacob Hite 449
Joist Hite 109
Richard Morgan 105
John Welton 130
Isaac, Henry and Jacob Van Meter total 158
from Kerns, n.d.30
would own a mill, much land, and a ferry operation in the years to come. Why is Van assessed but not his older brother? Thomas Swearingen was probably still living a few miles away across the river in Maryland on his Fellfoot property south of present-day Keedysville at the time of the assessment, but in May of 1744 he was the overseer of a new road being built from Thomas Shepherd’s mill southwest to Jacob Hite’s (present day Route 480), and took in some orphans associated with Jones Mill soon after. Terrapin Neck settlers also missing from the list include Jeremiah York - or anyone named Browning, suggesting there were minimal improvements on the disputed tract. The clerk of court, James Wood, may have known that York did not hold a patent to the land he (probably) lived on in Terrapin Neck, since it was Wood himself who had conducted the land survey there for the Hites ten years before. It is unknown why the Browning heirs were not assessed instead, unless the ownership question between Hite and Fairfax placed these people on a separate list. Did Frederick County assess only those who held a patented tract in 1744, or did Wood keep a separate list for those living on unpatented land? Researcher Kerns also noted some prominent individuals missing from the list for the Cacapon area for this year as well, and speculated that some settlers were too new to have come to the attention of the County authorities, or perhaps part of the Fee Book was missing. At any rate, this list strongly suggests that tobacco was a significant crop grown in the Terrapin Neck area at the time, though of course they didn’t have to grow tobacco, and may have bartered other goods to acquire enough tobacco to pay their assessments.
Another Indian Treaty was negotiated this year, called the Treaty of Lancaster. Indian negotiators, again led by the Iroquois who claimed to speak for all the tribes of the mid-Atlantic region, at first strongly asserted their claim for lands west of the Blue Ridge by right of conquest (not by settlement, because there hadn’t been any permanent Iroquois-related settlements in this area for some time), but ultimately signed over their rights to all lands between the Blue Ridge and Ohio River for £400 pounds. They were still allowed to travel their Indian Road between New York and the Carolinas, now roughly the route of Interstate 81 (see Md Archives v28, p336). This would now allow the legal settlement of the Maryland side of the River across from Shepherdstown, at least in terms of having accommodated (at least one of) the tribes.
Chapter 3 The Swearingens Become Prominent Under Lord Fairfax Rule
1745 - After years of dispute, the Fairfax Northern Neck Proprietary was defined and reaffirmed by the Privy Council in England, confirming the “first fountain” of the Cohongoroota as the head of the Potomac River, and making Fairfax the owner of over 5 million acres of Virginia! This essentially created two separate colonies within Virginia, at least in terms of acquiring a land grant, with Fairfax now in charge of all grants between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. A survey was ordered to mark the western boundary that became known as the Fairfax Line, a boundary line running NW from near the present-day Big Meadow area of Shenandoah National Park to the head spring of the Potomac near present-day Davis, West Virginia; the surveyors laid a stone monument at the head spring, known as the Fairfax stone, and its various replacements can still be seen today. The surveyors included Peter Jefferson (father of the third president), and Robert Brooke (the son of the surveyor for the 1734 Anderson, Mounts and Jones survey near Terrapin Neck). This created a situation where the Hites and Fairfax now “owned” some of the same land. The Hites and Fairfax got in a squabble and Fairfax refused to honor Hite titles 31
despite what he agreed to in 1738 (Couper 1952). Hite apparently had taken a long time to grudgingly provide to Fairfax names of settlers on lands Hite had surveyed, along with a description of the property boundaries. When he finally did provide them, the records and property descriptions were terrible; Fairfax felt disinclined to issue grants to what he considered fictitious people living on property with uncertain boundaries, and also wondered why the name “Hite” frequently appeared in the ledger obviously replacing a number of other erased names. Later court documents show that a high percentage of the acreage did go to the Hite family, though this was by no means a transgression of the terms of the 1730 grant purchased from the Van Meters. Using the names and acreages listed on page 174 in McKay (1951), Jost Hite’s name is the “assignee” associated with 12 of 52 parcels surveyed and patented in 1734 under the Van Meter grant, amounting to 18,869 acres, or 41% of the total acreage of 46,248 acres. There were 36 other family names in the list, and if legitimate, this was 6 more than was strictly needed. The other 100,000-acre grant that Hite held with several partners was perhaps more of an issue, as it was found that only about a third of the listed families were actually living on the property in question.
Fairfax also objected to the Hite surveys for their tendency to lock up the water resources of an area. Many of the property boundaries of the Hite-surveyed lands included only the long, thin bottomlands bordering a stream, plus any adjacent choice uplands including the nearby springs. This made it difficult for later settlers to utilize adjacent property because of the lack of water. For example, in the Shepherdstown area John Van Meter acquired a long, thin parcel totaling 1,786 acres that included most of the narrow watershed of what is now known as Rocky Marsh Run, while the original Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent included extensive Potomac River frontage, the lower portion of Rocky Marsh Run, and an irregular shape designed to acquire the several major springs in the area. Richard Morgan acquired a skinny 290-acre patent between and perpendicular to the two grants listed above which included a spring and a meadow that ran into Rocky Marsh Run (now the site of The Conservation Fund’s Freshwater Institute). Israel Friend’s 300-acre patent was a long, narrow bottomland tract adjacent to the Potomac just downstream from Packhorse Ford on the Virginia side and was cited repeatedly by Fairfax as an example of just what he was complaining about. Fairfax preferred what he called a “regular survey” that followed the Virginia Assembly order of Oct. 22, 1712 which required that surveyed parcels should have a breadth of at least one-third of their length (Brown 1965).
Because his original legal land grant description referred to “all that entire Tract, Territory, or porcon of Land situate, lying and beeing in America, and bounded by and within the heads of the Rivers of Rappahannock and Patawomecke...”, Fairfax encouraged everyone to begin using the name “Potomac” for the river north of Harpers Ferry, instead of the old name of Cohongoroota, which was of Indian derivation from the sound of a honking goose. Lawyers could potentially create mischief for his newly-won Proprietary if the boundary for his claim was known by Cohongoroota rather than Potomac, so the original Indian name had to go.
Closer to home, Thomas Swearingen was appointed guardian of John and Sarah Jones, orphans of the deceased mill owner Josiah Jones and their more recently deceased mother (O’Dell 1995). Thomas and his family had apparently moved to the Jones Mill property near Terrapin Neck shortly before this time; Thomas Swearingen and his heirs would own and run the “Jones” mill near present-day Scrabble for more than 70 years. The mill location was adjacent to the 32
Cohongoroota, which would allow barrels of flour and grain to be boated downstream to markets when water levels were high enough. Mill operators in that day kept a percentage of the grain brought to their mills as payment, and then sold the accumulated grain or flour to generate a profit (Stanton 1993).
In 1745, Thomas Shepherd was appointed overseer of a local road, in place of Van Swearingen (Fred. Cty Court Journal, No. 2, p.2, in Smyth 1909).
This year also marked the death of John Van Meter, who had been living upstream of the Jones Mill near present-day Rocky Marsh Run about 2 miles west of the little community being developed by John’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband Thomas Shepherd. John had spent the last years of his life raising horses in what became known as the Van Meter Marsh patent. He had given away in 1744 “all stalyons, geldings, mares and colts, running in the woods, branded on the left shoulder with the letter M” to various family members (Smythe 1909).
Note: Joseph and Remembrance Williams, brothers of Poulson’s wife Ann, are mentioned in several deeds in the Frederick County Court House in Winchester on land near Jones Mill and the area that eventually becomes RiverView Farm within the Poulson, Mounts and Jones grant about this time. Two adjacent parcels were described with them as owners?, but they seem not to have taken possession of the properties; this is probably a case of double titles for the same property, the confusion in part from the ongoing Hite-Fairfax controversy.
1746 - A death threw Peter Beller’s title to the Springwood property into doubt. By decree of the Frederick County court, May 1746, Peter Beller “recovered from Jonathon Simmons/Seaman an infant heir-at-law to Jonathon Seaman, late of Frederick County” the 317 acres Simmons Sr had bought from Joseph Mounts - the Springwood tract (described in Frederick County, VA Deed Book 4, p.121). It seems that Jonathon Simmons Sr died before the real estate sale to Beller was recorded (it was a long journey to the Frederick County Court House), automatically giving the property to Simmons, Jr., who was still a youngster. Beller filed suit in Chancery Court to recover the property, the court acknowledged Beller’s ownership and “ordered” the infant to honor the transaction when he was legally old enough to do so - within six months of his 21st birthday (this finally took place in 1762, after Beller sold the property to Van Swearingen, as will be seen). One can imagine Beller standing on the hill overlooking the river and mumbling ruefully “Mein Gott in Himmel” over this state of affairs…
1747 -Twelve years after his first visit, Lord Fairfax came back to the Virginia colony from Great Britain to defend and administer his Proprietary claims. He had settled his affairs in the British Isles and planned to live the rest of his life in the Virginia colony. A map of his Proprietary was finally published this year.
1748 - Thomas Swearingen acquired a 222 acre parcel (purchased from Richard Poulson) near the mill and the mouth of Rocky Marsh Run (Frederick County, VA DB 1, p. 396). He may have taken over the operation of the old Jones Mill there at this time, along with taking on the responsibilities and care of the Jones orphans.
1749 - Lord Fairfax, now living in Virginia full time, set up a land office near Winchester (strategically located not far from the Hites) and began surveying and selling grants of land. If a settler wanted title to unclaimed land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, the only choice now was to deal with the Fairfax land office. Fairfax employed a number of young men to survey portions of his Proprietary, including George Washington. Fairfax was also 33
commissioned Justice of the Peace for all Northern Neck lands, and served as local magistrate, county lieutenant, and vestryman of the Anglican Church. “Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in that part of Great Britain called Scotland, Proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia” was now established as the ruler of over 5 million acres. The Fairfax land office generally just re-granted land surveyed and sold by the Hites back to the Hites and their purchasers, despite all the squabbles, though this did not stop the antagonism between the two groups on the 27 contested parcels. Unfortunately Fairfax could not just re-grant the land on Terrapin Neck to the Hite purchaser (Browning), because Browning was dead and buried on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, had never settled the property, and had no heirs around claiming possession; the late date of the survey and sale may have also been a factor. The Swearingens, Jeremiah York and others in the vicinity of Terrapin Neck were among the first to apply to Fairfax for grants of land they already occupied and elsewhere.
The Hite family and their partners were likely a bitter, dejected lot at this time, though in the back of their minds all those years they must have considered the possibility that the Fairfax claim would be legally recognized. Despite almost 20 years of work their expected fortunes had not been realized and the courts offered their only hope of reclaiming their perceived losses. Predictably, Joist Hite and his partners filed their own lawsuit to test the validity of the Fairfax claim and to regain 36,686 acres of land that they had surveyed but hadn’t been able to patent because of Fairfax suddenly showing up out of the blue waving a decree from the King (including the 1200 acres on Terrapin Neck that had been surveyed 6 months past the deadline). The Hite land grants were in dire legal straits, and the Hite family certainly didn’t want to lose the bond money they would have to pay if their buyer’s titles proved defective! The Hites were only one of about a dozen groups of speculators who had been surveying and selling land in the Shenandoah Valley prior to Fairfax gaining legal title, but the Hites were the only land speculators who Fairfax could not seem to accommodate to their satisfaction, which Fairfax blamed in part on the Hite’s effrontery (Hyman 1996).
1750 - Peter Beller moved from his patented Springwood tract to a new 400 acre Fairfax grant near present-day Baker Heights (O’Dell 1995). With the 300+ patented acres on the Potomac and the new 400 acre grant, this suggests that Beller was primarily interested in plantation agriculture with shoemaking a sideline business benefiting friends and neighbors. Thomas Swearingen received a Fairfax grant of 478 acres next to his brother Van’s patented tract near present-day Shepherdstown; he had been living on the property near his mill, but was making plans for a new house and perhaps a ferry by this time, closer to Thomas Shepherd’s little town.
Farmers in the middle colonies, seeing diminishing returns from their fields, began using clover and grasses to help restore nitrogen to the soil about this time, 100 years after farmers in England first began the practice. Within a few years, wheat exports from these same middle colonies, including Maryland and northern Virginia, would account for about 20% of all colonial exports (Dufour 1994). 34
35
1752 - On 14 January, Van Swearingen received a grant from Fairfax for 187 acres near the entry to present-day Terrapin Neck Road, just south of the Beller property (maps are from data provided by G. Geertsema). The shape of the grant indicated he may have had an eye on the Beller property to the north, because the two properties combined would create a much more square shape than the original 1734 Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent boundary, while the 187 acres alone would be small, strangely shaped, and provide no significant source of water. His first foray into Fairfax grants may have been a disappointing experience. Whoever recorded the deed got his name wrong (Van Swaringham), and the surveyor used the wrong tree to describe the western corner, creating an issue with an earlier survey by his neighbor to the south (Richard Morgan) that had to be remedied. He also purchased a warrant for, and had surveyed, an additional 321 river-front acres on the east side of his patented land purchased in 1744 (now the Cress Creek development), and waited for a grant to be issued. His family had grown to 6 children by this time. The vestry of the Episcopal Church of Frederick County may have had at least two tight-faced members in their meetings this year, as it included among its membership John Hite (son of Joist Hite), Lord Fairfax, and Thomas Swearingen (Couper 1952).
1753 - Van Swearingen paid for a warrant and survey for a 200 acre tract along the unpatented northern boundary of Terrapin Neck, but waited over 6 years for the official grant from Fairfax to be issued. The deed would later describe, in standard fashion, 400 acres of waste land currently not claimed by anyone. He couldn’t claim all of Terrapin Neck since Jeremiah York already had a Fairfax grant for 323 acres out on the eastern end of the Neck, Vachel Medcalfe claimed an additional 300 acres, and Abraham James claimed 196 acres at the base of the Neck. Van and his neighbors almost certainly were aware of the Browning purchase in 1736, and the fact that the 1736 survey was completed past the deadline, but seemed willing to take a chance on Fairfax grants since a Browning had never asserted a right to the property. The surveyor for Fairfax was Thomas Rutherford, whose son eventually married Van’s daughter Drucilla. Van Swearingen may have been living on Peter Beller’s property (Springwood) by this time, but hadn’t paid for it yet. His neighbor out on the end of the Neck, Jeremiah York, sold his 323 acres for which he had received a Fairfax grant two years before to a William Chapline for 58 pounds - thus indicating that Chapline was not particularly worried about the Hite/Browning claim at this point (FCDB 3, p. 90). York, on the other hand, avoided any further legal machinations over title to land in the Fairfax Proprietary by selling out and moving to North Carolina with several other local families.
1754 - British settlers, traders and explorers heading west over the Appalachian mountains ran into French settlers and explorers heading south and east, with tensions rising over which European group would control the upper Potomac area and the Ohio River Valley. Many of the Native American groups living in what are now Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and New York had become familiar with the French traders and settlers during the more than 100 years of French exploration of the area, and some were convinced to ally with the French in their dispute with the British colonies. Several years later the British had their own Native allies for a short time, when the Cherokee and other groups in the Carolinas decided to weigh in on the side of the British. Later the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the British to use the growing British power to retain control over Native groups in the Ohio River valley. The various Indian groups across the continent had old alliances and scores to settle dating back decades or even hundreds of years, and it had long been common practice for them to travel thousands of miles to trade or 36
fight with other Natives - their participation in the British-French squabble over half a continent was a variation on a very familiar lifestyle for many of them.
By 1754 the French and Indian War had begun in earnest, the conflict – international in scope and also referred to as the Seven Years War – sparked by a young George Washington and a group of Virginians and Native Americans who together attacked a small party of Frenchmen sent to parley with the British group, killing and wounding (and eventually scalping) a number of them in a treacherous, less-than-honorable fashion even after a cease-fire had been in effect (who did what and when is still a matter of some controversy). Virginia’s Governor Dinwiddie, who had picked Washington to lead the expedition, was a major stockholder in a business venture known as The Ohio Company, which hoped to realize enormous profits by settling and trading in the upper Ohio River country. (Note that this venture was located in what is now western Pennsylvania, an area well north of the Potomac River which had been clearly defined as the boundary of the Virginia colony – a Virginia claim for this area took some real chutzpa). This gave Dinwiddie a personal incentive to send an inexperienced, unmotivated, poorly outfitted, unpopular, expensive military expedition to protect the company’s trading posts near present-day Pittsburgh, led by an enthusiastic 21-year-old surveyor named Washington intent on making a name for himself (see Anderson, 2001). Settlements in the lower Shenandoah Valley were attacked repeatedly by Indians over the next few years, and the terrified settlers occasionally dropped everything they were doing and banded together in panic-stricken caravans heading back east over the Blue Ridge. Several families and forts in the Martinsburg-Shepherdstown area were annihilated in raids; note that the terror was not a vicarious experience the Terrapin Neck settlers read about in the paper, but a horror that preyed on their imaginations every time a noise was heard in the night over a several year period. Peace would not come soon for the settlements further west; in fact, intermittent fighting in the upper Potomac Highlands and further west along the Ohio River would continue for more than 40 years. Authorities in Virginia committed a portion of their military forces to frontier forts to protect against war parties coming from the north, but an even larger number of militia were kept near home to protect the colony from a potential slave uprising. A fort was built in Thomas Shepherd’s little town around this time to protect the local settlers, and most of the men were required to join the local militia. Shepherd had begun to lay out town lots by this time and felt compelled to offer them on good terms to keep people from running away from the strife-torn area (see Dandridge 1910). Interestingly, his wife Elizabeth’s name was included on all the deeds over the years as co-owner and co-seller, indicating she considered herself a partner in the land business, an interest she may have picked up from her father John Van Meter. Thomas and Elizabeth Shepherd this year also became the proud parents of a fifth son, the eighth of their nine children; they named him Abraham. Abraham Shepherd will become a salient figure in the history of Terrapin Neck.
In his capacity now as a Justice of Frederick County, Thomas Swearingen took several depositions regarding the granting of land by the Fairfax land office (McKay 1951).
1755 - Title problems continued to plague many settlers in the area. For example, 100 acres of Thomas Swearingen’s 222 acres near Scrabble were bought and sold several times by other parties who had bought it from Joseph Mounts, even though J. Poulson had sold all 222 acres in 1748 to Swearingen (Frederick Cty VA DB 4, p. 190 and 193). It’s unknown if Swearingen knew about this at the time.37
Thomas Swearingen also received official sanction from the Virginia Council to operate a Ferry “from the land of Thomas Swearingen in the county of Frederick, over Potomack River, to the land opposite thereto in the province of Maryland” just north of the land owned and being developed by the Shepherds as a new town; this area also became known as Swearingen’s Ferry at the time - distinguishing this river crossing from Harper’s Ferry, which was down the river a few miles, and Watkin’s Ferry to the north. First mention of a Swearingen ferry at this location is in a 6 March 1753 Frederick County court road order appointing Capt. Richard Morgan as “overseer of the road from Jacob Hites to Mr Swearingen’s ferry” (Luckman and Miller 2005). Thomas would be remembered ever after as “Thomas of the Ferry”. The regulation of public ferries in Virginia was controlled at the Virginia Assembly, meaning Thomas had to get a bill passed in the Virginia Assembly before public ferry operations could be officially sanctioned. Ferries in Maryland, on the other hand, were either sponsored by the county (the ferryman was a salaried county employee), or unregulated private enterprise until a ferry regulation law was passed in 1781, meaning that Thomas Swearingen did not have to get a separate license from the colonial authorities in Maryland. The growing little community near Pack Horse Ford (i.e. the Shepherds) agreed to maintain a road from the town to the ferry landing near the present-day Bellevue property, while Marylanders built a road along the route through present-day Boonsboro and Sharpsburg to the ferry landing on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Thomas Swearingen was authorized to charge three pence, three farthings per person, and the same amount per horse. Separate prices were specified for various carriages, carts and wagons, while tobacco hogsheads and cattle cost the same as a horse, each sheep or goat cost one-fifth of a horse, and each hog cost one-fourth of a horse (Henning’s Statutes, May 1755, 28th year of George II, Chapter 12, An Act appointing several new Ferries).
In 1755 he ferried General Edward Braddock and part of his military force across the river on their ill-fated expedition to fight the French and Indians near the site of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Maryland Governor Horatio Sharpe, namesake of Sharpsburg, accompanied the expedition, and later reported paying “to Thomas Swearingen on Potomac for ferriage of General Braddock party and guard £8.2.0” (Green and Hahn, Ferry Hill Plantation Journal). Thomas Swearingen Jr. is mentioned as a Captain of a militia company at this time, as was his father Thomas and later his uncle Van Swearingen (Chalkley, v.2, p.503). Militia leader Adam Stephen, in a Nov. 1755 report to George Washington, mentioned that “Sweringhame was orderd out last Tuesday with 100 Men, to reconnoiter towards Sleepy-Creek, and the Warm Springs; but is not gone yet He & Caton cannot make up the number between them, so many have run off” (George Washington Papers Colonial Series 2: 158-162).
Thomas Swearingen’s ferry landing on the Virginia side of the river presented no ownership issues because it was located on his own property. The ferry landing on the opposite side, though, was potentially a problem because the property was owned at first by his neighbors in Virginia. Directly across the river from his Virginia property was the black walnut tree dividing the property known as Pell Mell then owned by the Shepherd family, from the property called Spurgin’s Lot, owned by William Spurgin, part of a larger tract called Antietam Bottom. Swearingen chose to land the ferry on the downstream side of the black walnut on Spurgin’s property, which seems not to have bothered Spurgin since he sold the 50 acre property to Swearingen three years later (Fred. Cty Md DB F, p. 504). The Shepherds, on the other hand, 38
later seem to seriously question the property boundary between the ferry landing and Pell Mell and claimed that the Swearingens were using the wrong walnut tree as a boundary marker. And so the controversy begins.
In January of 1755, Maryland’s Governor Sharpe traveled the Potomac River in a small boat from upstream near present-day Cumberland to tidewater at Georgetown, in order to assess what work needed to be done to make the river more navigable for boats floating military equipment and farm products. Baltimore merchants tended to balk at any scheme to promote Potomac River commerce, preferring that goods move through their own ports, so the lead for development of the Potomac River was carried on by Virginia mercantile interests, most notably a young George Washington who had been on his own inspection tours of the Potomac in August of that year (Hahn 1984). The Swearingens were likely using the Potomac to transport flour, tobacco, wheat and various other goods to the growing markets downstream in Alexandria and Georgetown. They were no doubt very familiar with the impassable Great Falls and Little Falls and other navigation hazards on the lower Potomac because they had grown up near the Fall Line, and still had relatives living there. Their farm products were likely offloaded above Great Falls and then loaded onto wagons for transport to the developing shipping ports on the tidal section of the river.
1756 - Van Swearingen purchased from Peter Beller 317 acres of the original Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent for 135 pounds (FCDB 4, p. 121). Now he officially owned the Springwood tract, which was just north of the Fairfax grant he had purchased several years before. Peter Beller may have been trying to escape all the troubles with title on Terrapin Neck - including waiting for the “infant” Simmons to sign a release when he reached the age of majority, the dispute between Hite and Fairfax on neighboring land, plus there were a lot of slaves and slave owners moving into the neighborhood which German Protestants generally objected to. Beller also gave Van Swearingen power of attorney to deal with any problems arising from this sale and young Simmons (FCDB 4, p.123). Apparently none of these problems dissuaded his neighbor Van Swearingen, who was a slave owner and may have been a distant relative of Simmons (Van’s cousin and sister-in-law Elizabeth was married to another Jonathon Simmons, who died in 1761 in Prince George’s County, MD). The Swearingen family also had the experience of the past two generations that settled frontier lands of Maryland; they may have been more comfortable with the inevitable problems in a new country. For example, Van’s uncle (and father-in-law) had settled on a piece of property in Maryland about 5 miles north of Terrapin Neck on St. James Run, built a house and other improvements, and then discovered someone else (probably Lord Baltimore’s 10,594 acre Conococheague Manor tract) had a prior claim - he had to settle for negotiating a lifetime lease for himself and his sons.
Note that some or all of the Springwood tract (now the eastern portion of NCTC) had been farmed by Europeans for more than 25 years before Van Swearingen acquired it officially, suggesting that reduced soil fertility may already have impacted the types of farming activities taking place on the new Swearingen plantation.
1757 - Thomas Swearingen polled 270 votes to George Washington’s 40 votes for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. His successful election meant that he, along with Hugh West, would represent Frederick County in the House sessions of March 25, 1756, April 30, 1757, and 39
March 30, 1758. His son, also named Thomas Swearingen, 22 years old and married to Mary Morgan, built a stone house next to his father’s mill just west of present-day NCTC, which is still a private residence today. They had a son named Thomas (of course) that same year.
1758 - In September Van Swearingen purchased an adjacent 132 acres of the Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent for 70 pounds “Pennsylvania money” that eventually became RiverView Farm (Frederick Cty VA DB 5, p. 187) and is now the western portion of NCTC; the boundaries were somewhat different than present. This was purchased from Joseph Poulson; there is no evidence that this was later regranted by Fairfax, but like the adjacent Springwood parcel a patent from the 1730s already covered it. Van and his brother Thomas together now owned several miles of contiguous waterfront on the Potomac adjacent to Terrapin Neck. Thomas was likely the wealthier and more influential of the two brothers by this time, having acquired over 1600 acres of land on the Virginia side of the river alone, in addition to his property in Maryland (where his ferry landed) and elsewhere. He was the elected representative from Frederick County in the Virginia House of Burgesses and a captain in the local militia. He also owned a mill near Scrabble (Jones Mill), and owned the ferry business across the Potomac River. His ferry alone had the potential to make him a wealthy man. In Fry and Jefferson’s map of Virginia for this time period, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road is shown crossing the Potomac at Swearingen’s Ferry. Settler families and assorted travelers numbering in the tens of thousands formed a steady procession south over this road at the time. Relatively low land prices in the Carolinas attracted newly-arrived immigrants as well as many settlers from the more northern colonies. It has been described as the most heavily traveled road in all America at the time, with perhaps more traffic than all the other main roads together (Rouse 1995). Some of these settlers, of course, chose to cross the Potomac further north at Watkins Ferry, established by the Virginia House of Burgesses Oct 9, 1744 at the site of present-day Williamsport, and they could cross at various fords when the water was low enough, but the Swearingen ferry, no doubt, did a considerable business. Also competing for business was Harpers Ferry a few river miles to the south, first mentioned in road maintenance court orders in 1755, but established officially a few years later in 1761 (Luckman and Miller 2005). Travelers in Virginia at this time could generally beg or barter meals, lodging and other needs, but if they wanted to cross the river without getting wet, they generally had to pay cash. A busy ferry operator therefore could expect to acquire bags of coin that other businesses and individuals would, of course, covet.
Thomas Swearingen was portrayed by George Washington, in a Oct. 9, 1757 letter to Governor Dinwiddie, “as a man of great weight with the meaner class of people, and supposed by them to possess extensive knowledge”, the description resulting from an altercation in Winchester where several townspeople had been found with military stores hidden in their homes. Much to the annoyance of Washington, the other local magistrates preferred waiting for Thomas Swearingen to arrive before passing judgement. (George Washington had also described the settlers of the Shenandoah Valley as a “parcel of barbarians”, Brown 1965). Lord Fairfax, in a September 1, 1756 letter to Washington, also expressed his less-than-enthusiastic opinion of Thomas Swearingen’s handling of militia matters during the French and Indian War by writing “Captain Swearingen... has always done everything in his power to occasion confusion if his advice was not taken in everything” (George Washington Papers Colonial Series 3:384-85). The Swearingen’s militia company at least had strict requirements for attendance: “At a Court Martial held for Frederick County on Fryday the 27th October 1758 Ordered that Joshua Hedges of the Company 40
commanded by Captain Thomas Swearingen be fined 10 shillings for absenting himself from One General Muster within a twelve months this last past” (Hedges family genealogy forum entry).
George Washington again ran for election for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses--in absentia because of military duties during the hostilities with the French (which he had helped instigate). Necessarily this time he had the campaign handled by friends. He defeated Thomas Swearingen by being much in the news with his military

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

A History
of the
National Conservation Training Center Property
and surrounding area
Revision July 2008
By Dan Everson2
Preface
My purpose for writing this history of the NCTC property and surrounding lands has been to describe the families that lived here, their strategies for making a living from the natural resources it had to offer, and their activities during the time they occupied the land. Most of my professional career has been spent as a field biologist, and I don’t have a long list of credentials as either a writer or historian. I simply ran across a story that intrigued me more and more as the details fell in place, and felt compelled to share it with others who might be interested in local history. My curiosity was first piqued during several afternoons I spent rambling over the property documenting the presence and distribution of plants. Old foundations and fence lines, broken pottery, bits of brick and glass all suggested a long history of use. Who were these people? What did the landscape look like before and after they arrived? Archaeological reports describing thousands of years of human occupation, the results of surveys and research conducted prior to the construction of NCTC facilities, also furthered an interest in who had lived here in the past. Local histories sometimes mentioned the people who had lived in the Terrapin Neck area, and I thought it might be interesting and useful to put these anecdotes and histories in a more systematic framework that would draw a more complete picture of their lives here. To the extent possible I have tried to make flesh and blood people- with motivations and real family histories- out of names, dates and various legal documents. For source materials I wanted to utilize reliably documented accounts and public records, which has led to many hours in archives, libraries and courthouses in West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Kentucky researching land grants, deeds, wills, letters and family genealogies; much time was also spent double-checking other authors’ citations. Published “family lore” accounts tended to be riddled with uncertainties and outright impossibilities and were therefore avoided unless the accounts were confirmed by other evidence. Even so, I expect that there are mistakes and misinterpretations in this work, and though the writing style may seem confident of the facts, I remain open to other lines of evidence that may present alternative views. I started this project a tabula rasa with no particular historical axe to grind other than a desire for an accurate portrayal based on objective data.
Court houses and public records are excellent sources for objective facts, but have a drawback in that they tend to narrowly focus on the activities of landowners who, in this case, have been mostly relatively wealthy Caucasian males (with some notable exceptions); this history would be much richer and would benefit greatly from an equal amount of detail concerning Native Americans, female family members, the slaves, the indentured servants and hired help, the subsistence farmers, renters, and other cultural groups who spent a significant part of their lives in the Terrapin Neck area, but whose thoughts and activities went unrecorded. I have included their stories when they could be found, but unfortunately most of the details of their lives can only be imagined or extrapolated from other sources in the region. (If you are aware of sources I could use, please let me know). The public records I used may also leave the impression that family life centered around the acquisition, disposal or debated ownership of various pieces of property, which is of course misleading. Again we are left with trying to imagine their daily activities, their hopes and dreams, and what brought joy, frustration and meaning to the families and individuals herein described.
While reading the following Eurocentric version of events keep in mind that for a significant 3
period of time after the arrival of Europeans, the most common faces on the property were not white. One of the nearly invisible groups in the historical record from about 1750 through at least the 1850’s is also likely to have been the largest – the enslaved people of African descent. Almost 40 percent of the people living in Virginia at the time of the first census in 1790 were held in slavery, while free blacks made up an additional 2 percent of the populace. Probate inventories and census records show that 10 to 20 slaves were based at the Springwood property at various times, and an equal number were associated with the RiverView Farm portion of the property. This suggests that on the property that has become the National Conservation Training Center, for about one hundred years the number of people living in chattel slavery outnumbered those of European descent by a ratio sometimes larger than 2:1. We get an occasional glimpse of their existence from probate inventories or tax assessments that include such information as first names, ages, and changes of ownership, but details of their families and experiences are mostly missing. That’s a lot of missing history, and I have tried to honor their lives by including their names whenever I could find them.
I wish to thank several people who encouraged me in this work, including Mark Madison, FWS historian at NCTC, Karel Whyte, Swearingen family genealogist, Don Wood and Galtjo Geertsema at the Berkeley County Historical Society who were generous in helping me locate maps and innumerable details, and André Darger, former NCTC course leader who provided a forum for some of this information in his Employee Foundations course; the course provided a strong incentive to try to get the details right. Jessie Hendrix and Elizabeth Hyman were among those who were generous in taking the time to check for accuracy, and were themselves significant sources of information. Any mistakes that remain are all mine.
A note about the maps: surveys and maps obtained from Galtjo Geertsema, surveyor from Martinsburg, WV, were very valuable. Further deed descriptions obtained in the Berkeley (WV) Jefferson (WV), Frederick (MD and VA), Washington (MD) County courthouses also were used to help decipher what sometimes amounted to a quagmire of distances and bearings used to describe new property boundaries, portions of which were just copied verbatim from earlier surveys, mistakes and all. By using both early and later surveys, and surveys from adjacent properties that described the same lines, I have a reasonable degree of confidence in the maps, especially those near present-day NCTC. The property boundaries for Thomas Swearingen’s heirs west of Shepherdstown in the enclosed 1770 map are based on Fairfax grants in the 1750s and 1760s and assume that parcels were not sold or added to in the meantime. The archives in the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort, Kentucky were invaluable in locating various land grants and other details related to the Revolutionary War period.
I consider this a work in progress and welcome new sources of information and further details on any of the topics I have written about.
Dan Everson
USFWS Biologist
email: dan_everson@fws.gov4
Disclaimer
The opinions and choices of material to include in this manuscript are those of the author. The US Government, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Conservation Training Center did not initiate, design or direct the writing of this manuscript and are not responsible for the accuracy, opinions or choice of materials. The author undertook this project solely to satisfy his curiosity, working on it intermittently during the occasional free moment of work time, as well as evenings and weekends over a several-year time span. As with any written history, the topics that are featured and the interpretation of events in this work are influenced by the biases and perceptions of the author, which include having grown up in a Scandinavian farming community in west-central Wisconsin. I have tried to be as inclusive as possible, so attention to certain cultural and socio-economic groups in this history should not be misconstrued as cultural myopia, but is instead an artifact of when, how, and for whom, public records were archived and indexed, as well as the tendency of our culture to follow and record the activities of limited members of a community or family. There are many voices missing in this work, not because these voices are unimportant or uninteresting, but because of the great difficulty, perhaps impossibility in many cases, of locating their words or accounts of their activities in the Terrapin Neck area. As I continue to search for information to fill some of these gaps, I make no claim to having written the history of the NCTC property, but merely a history that is at best incomplete, yet hopefully still interesting and useful. Tracking down and presenting the recorded history of the NCTC property has been a continual challenge, and has caused the author’s wife to use the word “obsessed” on several occasions. Tracking down and presenting the un-recorded history of the Terrapin Neck area, in order to capture those missing voices, is a challenge that may only be accomplished with your help. Copies of the manuscript have been made available by NCTC as a courtesy to guests and others who may be interested in local history. 5
A History of the National Conservation Training Center Property
Abstract
The following is a time line of significant events that have affected the land and ownership of the property now comprising the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC), with an emphasis on the period from early European settlement until shortly after the Revolutionary War. Included also are a few pages on 19th and 20th century history. Archeological evidence has shown that Native Americans utilized the site that became NCTC at least intermittently for more than 8000 years, and suggests that seasonal occupation ended about 700 years ago. European settlement of this area began in the 1720s, with newly arrived German settlers most recently from Pennsylvania, and other families especially from the Monocacy River valley in Maryland taking up lands along the western bank of the Potomac, then known as the Cohongoroota River. Some early European settlers in this area experienced many problems acquiring title to the land they occupied because of competing land claims of the Hite family and the Northern Neck Proprietary of Lord Fairfax. Two young Swearingen brothers, members of a slave-holding family with plantations in Maryland, acquired land near present-day Shepherdstown and on Terrapin Neck in the 1740s and 1750s, about twenty years after Europeans first began occupying the area. They first acquired patented property originally surveyed through the Hites and later also acquired grants through Lord Fairfax. Living on the frontier of a new country required an ability to run a self-sufficient plantation. They raised dairy and beef cattle, hogs, sheep and horses, grew corn, wheat, tobacco, rye and flax, and cultivated apple and pear orchards. They also must have raised other crops such as hemp and various other grains, fruits and vegetables commonly grown at the time, both as cash crops and to feed themselves and their slaves. Thomas Swearingen ran plantations, a mill near Scrabble and a ferry service across the Potomac, while Van Swearingen was a sheriff, militia leader, and owner of the plantation that became NCTC. The Swearingens were intimately involved with the political, military and ecclesiastical issues of the day, particularly at local and regional levels. Their period of time here was a turbulent one, both locally and throughout the colonies, characterized by over 40 years of strife beginning with the French and Indian War in the 1750s, with various family members engaged in military struggles through the 1790s. Some of the Swearingen property and wealth was lost after the Revolutionary War because of an ancient lawsuit between competing land claims. The 1790s were years of transition, with deaths and lawsuits bringing about changes in land ownership in the Terrapin Neck area, though the Swearingens continued to run a plantation later known as RiverView Farm - now the western section of NCTC - until the Civil War. The eastern section of the NCTC property, referred to as the Springwood estate in this document, became part of the wealthy Shepherd family holdings at the beginning of the 19th century; they retained it for about a century. Parts of the original Swearingen estate were consolidated into a single property again in the early 1940s by the Hendrix family. A member of this family sold the property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in March of 1992. 6
A note about names:
Several of the family names prominent in this history have been standardized to a common spelling. John Van Meter’s name in other publications and documents may be spelled in various ways including Jan Van Metre, Van Meteren, Vanmater and Vanmetre. Joist Hite usually spelled his name Jost Heydt, but records may show Joost Heyd and other combinations. Swearingen may appear as Swaringen, Sweringen, VanSwearingen and other phonetic characterizations.
For the sake of simplicity I have referred to the western portion of the NCTC property as RiverView Farm and the eastern portion as Springwood throughout the document. It should be understood that both these names are of relatively recent vintage: RiverView Farm first appears on a deed in 1896, and Springwood is probably mid 20th century. Springwood in the past has had other appellations including Mapleshade (1920s) and Shepherd’s Lower Farm (1870s-1890s). Nearby Shepherdstown has had other names such as Mecklenburg or Packhorse Ford which will occasionally appear in the text. Because property boundaries have changed over the years I also occasionally refer to now-adjacent properties as being part of RiverView Farm; for example the property now known as the Lost Drake Farm southwest of the NCTC entrance was the former home of Hezekiah Swearingen who eventually inherited the adjacent tract to the north that became RiverView Farm, which was largely developed by his son Van. The property now known as the Wild Goose Farm was also Swearingen property from 1828 to 1838. So to reduce confusion, in this document RiverView Farm will be used to describe those lands that were acquired by Hezekiah Swearingen from his father (who once owned both Springwood and RiverView Farm) in the late 18th century and remained with his heirs through the Civil War, while Springwood refers to the eastern portion of NCTC held by the Shepherds from about 1807 to 1907 that now includes the campus and the Hendrix life estate. How - and perhaps why - the Shepherd family acquired the Springwood property in the 19th century is a major theme of the following compilation. 7
Time line of Events
Native Americans lived intermittently along the edge of the river they called the Cohongoroota for thousands of years. Riverbottom lands provided fertile soil for their fields of squash and corn, and the rolling limestone uplands supported plentiful resources including large herds of buffalo and elk grazing in the meadows amidst scattered patches of oak-hickory forest. Village locations changed frequently based on the availability of resources and competition with other groups. The latest evidence for a seasonal encampment at the site that became NCTC is dated at about 400 years before Europeans first explored the lower Shenandoah Valley. Among the enduring legacies of the people who once lived here are the beautiful names given to local creeks and rivers: Shenandoah, Antietam, Opequon, Tuscarora, Conococheague, Cacapon.
Chapter 1 Early Colonial Period
1649 - Forty-two years after British colonists first landed at the site they named Jamestown, the British monarch-in-exile Charles II felt it necessary to be generous. His father, King Charles I, had recently been beheaded for, among other complaints, defying parliament, and religious zealotry that included having the noses and ears cut off subjects who refused to join the Anglican Church. Now young Charles had been forced by the equally zealous Puritan Roundheads to take sanctuary in Scotland and then France. He would wait 11 more years for the Restoration of the Monarchy, but in the meantime he promised a large land grant in Virginia, later known as the Northern Neck Proprietary, to six noblemen friends because of their support of the Crown in those troubled times. One hundred fifty years later, people living on Terrapin Neck near Shepherds Town, Virginia, would have cause to regret this generosity.
The newly-promised Proprietary was to include all the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. Europeans didn’t have a clue as to where these rivers actually began, there being a vague notion at the time that the rivers had their headwaters in the Blue Ridge somewhere off to the west of the settlements on the coast. The exiled heir to the throne and his friends had no idea how much land had just been given away, provided of course that young Charles should ever re-establish the British monarchy. More than 80 years would pass before a commission in Virginia set out to find the head springs of the two rivers and thus determine the boundaries, it having become apparent in the meantime that the Potomac actually passed through the Blue Ridge at present-day Harpers Ferry and had its headwaters well to the west in the Alleghenies.
This type of land grant was not unprecedented - other colonial proprietors in the mid-Atlantic region included Lord Baltimore in Maryland and William Penn in Pennsylvania. In fact Lord Baltimore’s new proprietorship had been carved out of land originally promised to the Virginia colony, leading to frantic visits to the King and his court, as well as naval attacks in the Chesapeake Bay and several pitched battles between the competing British factions on several occasions through the 1650s. The British lords with interest in the New World competed for 8
high stakes - proprietors were given full governing rights inside their granted lands, and could make large amounts of money selling tracts of land to settlers. A settler interested in a plantation lifestyle could receive land by grant from the proprietor, and could then keep, sell, bequeath, or entail that land so long as they paid an annual quit rent per acre to the proprietor during the duration of their ownership. The colony of Virginia, on the other hand, was a Crown Colony, ruled by the current monarch in power, and administered through a Governor and Council in Williamsburg, Virginia. (The King originally did not rule over Virginia as Sovereign of England, but instead the colony was considered part of his feudal manor holdings, which meant he ruled over Virginia as a feudal lord, like the proprietors.) Lands granted by the colonial Council in Virginia, with the governor’s stamp of approval, became known as King’s Patents. Land speculators in Virginia who had been given Orders of Council for large tracts of land to sell and distribute, acting as middlemen, also offered another avenue for a settler to acquire a King’s Patent. The Virginia Council, as well as the Northern Neck Proprietary, and a number of large land speculators eventually operated land offices in Virginia from which settlers could acquire land. The Virginia Council had a strong interest in locating settlers on the margin of the colony both as a source of revenue through land sales and rents, and as a buffer to the wilderness and all its hazards, which explains their eagerness to give out large land grants to speculating middlemen on the periphery who could draw in those settlers.
It is unknown when the Virginia colonists first heard of the new proprietary, but no doubt the Virginians were dismayed at the prospect of losing control of yet another large tract of land, having already been forced to give up the northern portion of the Chesapeake Bay country to the Calverts and Lord Baltimore. The new Northern Neck Proprietary seems to have generated fewer violent sparks than when Maryland was created, perhaps because most of the land lay to the unknown west beyond the tidewater settlements, and there was not an immediate influx of new governing authorities marking boundaries and clamoring for resources. The relatively small number of settlers in Virginia generally stayed close to their tidewater plantations for many years because of fear of Indians, and the threat was real - some 350 colonists were killed by Indians in the Virginia colony in 1641 alone (Couper 1952).
1660 - Charles II returned triumphantly to England as King after the death of Oliver Cromwell. Many of his loyal followers had lost much of their property while he was in exile and responded by moving to one of the colonies across the Atlantic, and at least several were grateful for having been granted large tracts of land in the New World as partial compensation.
1685 - Joist Hite was born in Bonfeld, Germany, son of a local butcher and a member of the Protestant church; he will play a major role in northern Virginia history (Jones et. al 1979).
1690 - By this year deaths and marriages had transferred the bulk of the Northern Neck Proprietary in Virginia into one family of the British peerage, Lord Fairfax (who had acquired it through marriage to a Culpeper). Lord and Lady Fairfax lived on large castled estates in England; they would never see their Virginia lands. Nevertheless, Lord Fairfax did employ agents in the Virginia Colony to administer the Proprietary and to see that the local Virginia 9
Council did not infringe on his lands between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers as the Council handed out their own grants in the region. The Virginia Council often ignored the Fairfax claim to the land and gave out land grants within the disputed area anyway. At this time the Virginia Colony was selling frontier lands not only to individual settler families but also to land speculators, who provided a service by surveying the land and bringing in additional settler families. The land speculators, in tandem with their settlers, were required to survey parcels of land and have them recorded for the issuance of a patent by the Governor or Proprietor. There wasn’t always a strong distinction between the speculators and settlers because they often belonged to the same extended family. Once the governor issued a settler a patent, they then held a strong legal title to the land. In order to acquire a large land grant, land speculators were usually required to bring in a specified number of settlers to the colony by a specified deadline. The settlers then paid fees and rents to the large land speculators. The system necessarily meant that a lot of money traded hands; it also provided the potential for some of the middlemen to get rich, and created a strong financial incentive to attract settlers. Land patents from the Virginia Council and grants from the Fairfax Proprietary were mostly in the Coastal Plain and Piedmont areas of Virginia through the 1720's; the lower Shenandoah Valley on the western side of the Blue Ridge was largely unexplored before 1700, and will become the focus of the following narrative. Early Virginia history is replete with tales of European exploring parties setting out westward, walking up the moderate slopes of the Blue Ridge and gazing out over the Shenandoah Valley, supposedly uttering flowery phrases and waxing poetic over the lovely vision before them, followed by the congratulatory backslapping return with lusty tales of adventure describing hardships and toil for the ears of the more timid souls who had remained safely at home. You have to wonder, since a traverse of the Blue Ridge is hardly a Himalayan odyssey, if there were a few traders, trappers or Native Americans nearby thinking to themselves “big deal, my grandmother walks up there every week…”.
The rise of the tobacco plantation culture in the colonies, especially in Maryland and Virginia, required an ever-increasing pool of reliable labor. The European indenture system wherein a settler’s passage to the colony could be worked off over a period of years was not able to meet the demand for labor. Africans had first arrived in Virginia in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 individuals to Jamestown - with families, property, history, culture, hopes and dreams of their own - that were sold into servitude for supplies. At first their status was more similar to that of European indentured servants, with some of them eventually becoming business and property owners. Virginia law gradually over several decades disenfranchised Africans, changing their status into slaves; it wasn’t until 1662 that slavery was codified in Virginia statutes. By the 1690s large numbers of enslaved Africans began to be imported into the middle colonies. The majority of landowners were not slaveowners, and those that were often could afford only one or two slaves that worked alongside white family members. Most of the slaves in the colonies were concentrated on a relatively small number of very large plantations (Dufour 1994).
1693 - In Britain, the Fairfax family, who had acquired the rights to the Northern Neck Proprietary in Virginia, asked for and received confirmation of their Proprietary from the King. 10
They apparently hoped this would resolve once and for all who held title to the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers in that wild, uncivilized colony across the Atlantic. It didn’t.
1699 - A new system of land grants became available to immigrants coming into the Virginia colony, referred to as treasury rights. This allowed anyone to purchase land, 100 acres for 10 shillings. To retain ownership, an annual quit rent and occupation of the property was necessary.
This replaced the old system of acquiring land by bringing in settlers, known as head rights.
1702 - Robert Carter, in Williamsburg, Virginia, became the agent of Lord Fairfax. Until his death in 1732, he was particularly effective at controlling or at least lodging legal complaints (caveats) against infringements on Fairfax Proprietary lands. He eventually held all the important positions on the governing Council of the colony while at the same time acting as Fairfax’s agent. His tenacity may have tended to reduce settlement in the lower Shenandoah Valley because of the difficulties in acquiring a clear legal title to the land. He and other Fairfax agents managed to steer many land grants toward members of their own families - thus adding significantly to the Carter, Fitzhugh, and Lee family fortunes in Virginia.
1705 - The Virginia colony passed a law forbidding the granting of patents in excess of 4000 acres; exceptions to this policy were sometimes given to companies and individuals. To the north in Pennsylvania, William Penn’s Proprietary had now expanded to almost the Susquehanna River. Native American groups (at least those that were paid) tended to be more tolerant of the Pennsylvanian settlers because of Penn’s policy of purchasing land from the local tribes. The English settlers in Virginia and Maryland, on the other hand, were referred to by the natives as "Long Knives" because of their habit of acquiring land by force. At this time the French were exploring and settling the Ohio Valley, and the Spanish were increasing their settlements in Florida and along the lower Mississippi.
1709 - Joist Hite, born in Germany, crossed the Atlantic and settled in New York with a number of other Dutch and German families, including his father and stepmother. He had married Anna Maria Mercklin 5 years before, and had worked as a linen weaver before setting sail from Rotterdam with several other local families; Anna had given birth to two children but they hadn’t survived. Many history texts describe him then as a wealthy, distinguished businessman with the financial wherewithal and influence to organize and finance the journey to the New World for many families, and was supposedly even able to provide his own ships; the histories then go on to describe his inevitable continued success and prominence as a real estate entrepreneur in the New World. It would be interesting to see where this fable originated, as recent scholarship points to a more humble origin - he has been documented as crossing the Atlantic as one of a group of indentured servants who worked for a time at a failed business venture in New York. By 1714 he was apparently a landowner with a growing family living north of Philadelphia, and about 3 years later he owned a plantation and gristmill outside the present community of Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Philadelphia, and was doing some weaving on the side (Jones et al. 1979). His later efforts at administering a large land grant in the lower Shenandoah Valley of Virginia will prove to be a major chapter in the history of the land that has now become the National Conservation Training Center. In Britain, the Fifth Lord Fairfax died, leaving title to the bulk of the Northern Neck Proprietary in Lady Fairfax’s hand, though her Culpeper family members retained a percentage of ownership as well.
1719 - Lady Fairfax died. Her 24-year old son Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, became the sole Proprietor of the Northern Neck in Virginia. He owned only a 1/6 interest in the Virginia proprietary outright, the other 5/6 he held only for his lifetime. He had rather reclusive, taciturn bachelor tendencies, and often preferred to spend his time alone on his British estates rather than engage in the typical aristocratic functions of a young British peer.
Terrapin Neck
1720's - The debate over exactly when a permanent community in the Shepherdstown area first developed has not been resolved - some authors put the date as early as 1706, others 1719, others still later in the 1720s. If in fact Europeans lived in the area before 1720, they seem most likely to have been itinerant groups that stretch the definition of "community", since they seem not to
11
12
have built substantial cabins, churches, mills, or cleared extensive fields, or laid any claim - official or unofficial - to land or springs and water resources of the area; it’s possible that one or more small European groups lived near present-day Shepherdstown in the manner of the Native Americans who still established small temporary camps in the region at the time, perhaps trapping, hunting, trading and gardening to survive. In the early to mid-1720s there seems not to have been an established group of people willing to defend their claims to any large land holdings near present-day Shepherdstown, the evidence being the number of springs, creeks and rich bottom lands -the most valuable real estate- that remained to be claimed in the late 1720s by families such as the Van Meters, Morgans, Shepherds and others (these families, of course, may have purchased or bartered the rights to these water sources from earlier arrivals who didn’t intend to stay, though there is no evidence of this). So with due caution, the second half of the 1720s probably marked the arrival of the first long-term "settlers" into what became the Shepherdstown community. At the regional level, many of the early settlers coming into northern Virginia and northern Maryland were Germans most recently from the Lancaster and York areas of Pennsylvania. William Penn’s agents had been busy in the Rhine Valley of Germany attempting to lure settlers into Penn’s proprietary. After arriving by the shipload in Philadelphia and other ports, many of the newly arrived settlers stopped in the small established German communities in Pennsylvania such as York and Lancaster only long enough to ask for directions to the closest available land. Many of these settlers belonged to various sects of the Protestant faith seeking land and a place to practice free expressions of their faith, including Moravians, Quakers, Dunkers, and Friends. It is misleading in some respects to refer to them as "German", since many of them had spent only a short time in what was referred to as the Palatine area of Germany. Their Protestant faith had made them unwelcome in many parts of Europe, so they had sought refuge in the Palatinate and may have lived there less than a generation in many cases. William Penn’s agents no doubt found them an attentive audience. After negotiating the wilderness paths south out of Pennsylvania (Mason and Dixon would not begin marking the legal border between Maryland and Pennsylvania until 1763 – many at the time considered Lancaster to be in Maryland), and their arrival on the other side of the Cohongoroota River in Virginia near the river ford, a few groups may have set about building cabins and clearing a bit of land for pasture and crops. The first arrivals had no readily available system in place to acquire legal title to the land they occupied, and had to depend on other settlers’ willingness to recognize their "tomahawk rights", which refers to their method of marking property claims by blazing marks on the trunks of trees. New settlers would find it difficult to develop legal, cultural and social ties with Williamsburg and the other European-populated areas of Virginia because of the distance and lack of roads - therefore they were rather tenuously "Virginians" only in a narrow geographical context, and even that was debated for years until the leaders of the colonies agreed on which tributary constituted the main stem of the Potomac River. (Lawsuits debating the boundaries between Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania continued even up to the 20th century).
In a 1721 map made for Philomen Lloyd, the Secretary of the Maryland Colony, the area upstream of the mouth of the Monocacy River is described as “Potommeck above Ye Inhabitants” and shows the correct relative positions (and the present-day names) of the 13
Conococheague, Opequon, and Antietam creeks. An interesting map notation for an area near Opequon Creek about 8 miles west of NCTC near the present site of Bedington, West Virginia is “Opeckhon Creek: A Salt Soyl called ye Elk’s Licking Place. Great Droves of those Creatures resorting there to lick ye Earth”.
Settlement of the northern (Lower) portion of the Shenandoah Valley was given impetus in 1722 with the Treaty of Albany between Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Five Nations Indians (the Iroquois Confederacy, which included such groups as the Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Oneidas and Onandagas). The northern Indians agreed not to cross the Cohongoroota (Potomac), or the Blue Ridge, without a pass (only 10 passes to be issued at a time), upon pain of death or slavery. This treaty clearly made piedmont Virginia and Maryland just to the east of the Blue Ridge very desirable for settlement by recently-arrived Europeans, allowing greater European familiarity with the Shenandoah Valley on the other side of the long ridge. Indians were still allowed to travel through and otherwise utilize the Shenandoah Valley along their Warrior’s Path, which extended from New York to the Carolinas. The powerful Iroquois, centered in New York, had fought tenaciously for many years with other tribes in eastern North America for control over trade and other resources, and seem to have benefited from this treaty at the expense of some of the other tribes under their “protection” in the mid-Atlantic region, a strategy they pursued at various councils through the early 1750s. The northern Iroquois negotiators, who claimed to speak for all the Native American groups in the area including the Shawnee and Delaware (Lenni-Lenape*), apparently were willing to sacrifice (for a fee) a large land area for which the Iroquois had a very tenuous claim even from the Native American perspective. The treaty still allowed the Iroquois Confederacy to outfit and send warparties south through the Shenandoah Valley to continue their long-term conflict for control over several southern tribes including the Cherokee and Catawba. European travel in the region was not constrained by any language in the treaty. (* Delaware is from a British family name (Lord De La Warr) given to a river by the colonists, and then to the native people living nearby; Lenni-Lenape is what the tribe living in the Delaware River Valley called themselves.)
1725 - Charles Mounts Anderson, early explorer and operator of an Indian trading post on the Monocacy River near present-day Frederick, Maryland, was asked by the Maryland Assembly to provide a meeting place at his home for a council with a local Indian tribe. A John Powell was charged with inviting the Indians, and was "to go to Shuano town on Potomack, commonly called Opessa’s Town”; he was provided calico shirts and scarlet worsted stockings to be used as gifts to help induce the Indians to attend. The purpose of the proposed council was to negotiate with the Shawnee over returning slaves they had been harboring - but the Shuano (Shawnee) Indians chose not to show up on the appointed date, and Anderson’s partner Israel Friend was sent back to invite them to visit Annapolis instead (Archives of Md, vol. 25 p 443, 451). Opessa’s Town is now called Oldtown, located on the Potomac River between Hancock and Cumberland, Maryland, about 50 miles west of Shepherdstown. Charles Anderson had been in the Indian trading business since at least 1712, when he was recorded as entering into a lawsuit in Cecil Co, Maryland, with the widow of Indian trader Jacque LeTort, who lived at the Indian town at Conestoga, Pennsylvania (see Diller, n.d). Charles Anderson had been involved with negotiations over these same slaves since at least 1722 when the Maryland Council, hearing he 14
was in Annapolis, had asked him to go to the Shuano town (Oldtown) with gifts of coats and socks, and a promise of a "chain of friendship" for "so long as the sun and moon shall endure", especially if they would give the slaves back (Md Archives, vol 25, p. 395).
1726 - John Van Meter and his family purchased a 200 acre tract from Lord Baltimore near present-day Frederick, Maryland in the Monocacy River valley settlement known as Monocacy Hundred. The Van Meters were of Dutch origin, and had been in the Dutch colonies near New York and New Jersey for several generations; at least some of them were slave owners, as John’s grandfather mentioned 6 slaves in his will (K. B. Rogers, n.d.). All of John’s children were born on land the family owned in New Jersey, but the family had moved west to Maryland by the early 1720s. John, 43, and occasionally his younger brother Isaac were itinerant traders in the Monocacy River valley, and they no doubt had some contact with Charles Anderson’s Indian trading post there. Their father, nicknamed “the Dutchman on the Hudson”, had also been a widely traveled Indian trader and supposedly had encouraged his sons to settle in the upper Potomac region he had once explored. The Van Meters were likely well acquainted with a fellow Dutch family named Swearingen living nearby at the time. The Van Meters certainly became acquainted with another family living in the neighborhood - John’s daughter Elizabeth would marry Thomas Shepherd in a few years, and the young couple would, with Elizabeth’s parents and several of their neighbors and relatives, soon take up land on the other side of the Cohongoroota River near a ford along the old wilderness trail, which the Shepherds years later developed as “Shepherdstown”.
May of 1726 marked the death of Thomas Swearingen, a slave-owning plantation owner living not far from the Potomac River near present-day Chevy Chase, Maryland (a northern suburb of Washington DC). He left behind 3 daughters – Margaret, Luranna, and Mary – and two sons including Thomas, who was 18, and Van, who was a young lad of 7. All the children were bequeathed land in the will: Margaret and Luranna each received 40 acres of “Hills Choys”, Mary received 96 acres of “Swearingens Pasture”, Thomas received 70 acres of “Forest”, and young Van received 70 acres of “Forest” and 20 acres of “Hills Choys”. Van Swearingen will become a major focus of the rest of this narrative.
1727 - Sometime this decade a small number of German immigrants and others from colonies in Maryland and New Jersey may have begun forming a community near Pack Horse Ford on the Virginia side of the Cohongoroota River, along the old wilderness trail that had been used for thousands of years by the native Americans, located a mile or so south of the land later developed by the Shepherds. These first Europeans left few traces of their time spent here, vague church records, explorer’s accounts and uncertain graves being the bulk of the evidence (see Dandridge 1910, Bushong 1941). There are records of Europeans exploring this area before 1729, though it may be stretching it a bit to call them a community before about 1730. Within a few years land sales and legal actions recorded at Virginia courthouses would provide better documentation of these and perhaps later arrivals, including the Morgans, Shepherds, Weltons and Van Meters. The Native Americans had not been forced to give up their use of the Shenandoah Valley at this time, by either violence or treaty, but the Europeans apparently felt 15
that the small numbers of Natives who traveled through the area did not present enough of a menace to keep them from settling there. The Natives were getting anxious, though: in a letter to the authorities in Maryland complaining of white incursions near the Cohongoroota (Potomac) in 1731-32, several Indian representatives of the Five Nations, including one Capt. Civility, specifically mentioned that they had sold land only to Israel Friend, the trading partner of Charles Anderson, near Antietam Creek on the eastern (Maryland) side of the Cohongoroota near Pack Horse Ford (Md Archives vol. 28, p.10-11). They considered any other whites settling in the area to be trespassing and urged the Maryland authorities to stop the surveying of property.
Among those possibly “trespassing” was 19-year-old Thomas Swearingen, who apparently made a claim for 115 acres of land on Little Antietam Creek, south of present-day Sharpsburg and Keedysville Maryland, dating from on or before Nov. 1727 in what is now Washington County Maryland. He patented this property on June 12, 1734 (website for a map of the location: midatlantic.rootsweb.com/MD/washington/plats/platmap.html). The property, later known as part of a much larger tract called Fellfoot owned by Tobias Stansbury of Baltimore, was purchased by Stansbury from Thomas Swearingen and his wife Sarah in the 1750s (Fred.Cty Md DB E, p433). This is the first record indicating that the Swearingens from near present-day Chevy Chase were interested in a new plantation further north in Maryland on the western side of the Blue Ridge, again located only a few miles from the Potomac. (A few other locally-prominent families such as the Chaplines made the same journey from tidewater Maryland at the same time).
1728 - Peter Beller and his wife, likely recent German immigrants, were baptized in a German religious community near Lancaster, Pennsylvania after helplessly watching their young daughter die (Klein 1926). They would soon be migrating further southwest to the colonial frontier beyond the Blue Ridge. (This may be a different Peter Beller than the one who eventually owned NCTC property, but the timing and circumstances seem right. There was also a Peter Bellar who had owned, prior to 1712, the same piece of property north of Philadelphia later purchased by Joist Hite [ Phil Deed Book F, Vol 2, p. 48]).
1729 - Brothers John and Isaac Van Meter, explorers and traders from the Monocacy River valley in Maryland (Isaac and his family mostly remained in New Jersey at this time) built a cabin about 2 miles west of present-day Shepherdstown, West Virginia near where Route 45 crosses Rocky Marsh Run. They had spent some time in the last several years making contacts with authorities in Virginia about acquiring a large land grant, which included talks with Robert “King” Carter, representing Lord Fairfax and the Northern Neck Proprietary. They no doubt agonized over who held the rightful claim, the Virginia Colony, or Lord Fairfax in Great Britain? John Van Meter became the Constable of Monocosie Hundred in Maryland in 1729, a position he would hold intermittently through 1734, suggesting that his Virginia cabin was a temporary dwelling at first. The Virginia cabin site eventually became his home in the mid-1730s and became part of a patented property of over 1700 acres that included most of the watershed of the spring-fed creek now known as Rocky Marsh Run. It’s interesting to note that John, who could presumably pick out the most desirable property in the entire area, deliberately picked out the wettest, marshiest site around, and for years his tract was referred to as the Van Meter Marsh patent. (Homeowners now living in this area are occasionally the subject of local newspaper 16
articles during wet years – the intermittently marshy aspect of the landscape has apparently become less desirable in recent years, and some would prefer that the perennial surface water, so attractive to the Van Meters, drained a little faster to the Potomac through the now-channelized sections of creek.) Before moving full time to Virginia, Van Meter lived in what was known as the Monocasie Hundred which encompassed an area extending from the mouth of the Monocacy River where it joined with the Potomac up into Pennsylvania, including the area now known as Frederick, Maryland. After writing a letter to authorities complaining of “abuses” by the settlers in Monocacie Hundred, Constable Van Meter was given a couple of deputies, including one Joseph Mounts (Tracy and Dern 1987).
Back in Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, Robert Carter unsuccessfully petitioned the King via the Virginia Council to stop issuing patents within or near the Fairfax Proprietary until the boundaries were determined. The colonists still didn’t know where the headwaters of the Potomac or Rappahannock Rivers were, and so couldn’t determine what lands were within the Proprietary; the Virginia Council perhaps saw a benefit in remaining obtuse about the boundary location for the time being. Many in Virginia preferred to interpret “head” of the Potomac as describing the head of navigation, which would make the Proprietary much smaller by including land only in the coastal plain. Fairfax, of course, preferred the “first fountain” definition.
Chapter 2 European Settlement of Terrapin Neck
1730 - On June 17, the Van Meter brothers, after petitioning the Virginia Council for land grants for themselves, their many children and diverse relatives, were successful in acquiring a combined 40,000 acre grant from the colonial government of Virginia in the lower Shenandoah Valley. Thirty thousand acres, or ¾ of the total, were to be located between the “Sherando” and “Operkin” (Shenandoah and Opequon) rivers - clearly well within the Northern Neck Proprietary also claimed by Lord Fairfax. The brothers together were required by the Council to settle themselves and 30 other families within two years to retain title to the acreage. Note that they were not given all the land between the Shenandoah and the Opequon, nor were they required to mark out a single large block of land. On the contrary, they were allowed to mark, survey and sell the best portions to themselves, their friends, and their new settler families, usually in parcels amounting to several hundred acres, until they eventually accumulated 40,000 acres. In short they were given the sole rights to a two-year hunting license for 10,000 acres within the forks of the Shenandoah River (an area including the heavily wooded upland called Massanutten Mountain, part of the George Washington National Forest, and the flatter land near Front Royal), as well as 30,000 acres bounded by the Shenandoah, Potomac and Opequon rivers. This also meant, of course, that the Van Meters had to be nervous about claiming ownership to land that someone may have already been living on and was willing to defend – other occupants, if any, could decide for themselves whether to purchase a legal title for their claim from the Van Meters during this two-year period. Other potential settlers could also approach the Virginia Council to gain title after the two years were up, and they probably also had to consider dealing with Lord 17
Fairfax’s agents since Fairfax considered this part of his Proprietary (the text of the Van Meter grant is included in the appendix). John Van Meter, in his rounds as Constable of the Monocosie Hundred in Maryland, no doubt informed all his friends and neighbors of his new land grant, and the wonderful land they could acquire from him across the river in Virginia. The Van Meters and the Virginia Council were fully aware that Fairfax held a prior claim to the land, well before the petition was heard; in fact, in later legal proceedings, Fairfax pointed out that the Van Meters had approached him first for a grant (Couper 1952). In ignoring the Fairfax claim the Virginia Council and Governor Gooch probably considered it an opportune time to try to solidify their own claim, particularly since the neighboring colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania were expanding rapidly. As settlers pushed westward in a search for land, legal boundaries in the colonies at this time were routinely redrawn, ignored or became obsolete. In the 40 years that the Proprietary had been in Fairfax hands, the Fairfax family had never shown any inclination to travel to the colony to personally administer their claim, and it was probably fairly easy to ignore the Fairfax agents when they started to complain. True to form, Robert Carter issued a caveat for Fairfax at the time that the Van Meter petition was being considered. (To keep the Fairfax claim alive, Fairfax’s agent Robert Carter issued the first Fairfax grant in the Shenandoah Valley to a member of the Carter family 3 months later on September 22.)
The Van Meter brothers weren’t alone in their petition for land in the lower Shenandoah Valley, as other land speculators acquired grants within the Fairfax Proprietary this year as well. The Virginia Council granted land on the west side of the Opequon River in Virginia to Quaker leaders Alexander Ross and Morgan Bryan with similar requirements for bringing in new settlers. Quakers from Pennsylvania and Maryland soon began packing up and moving to Virginia. The Quaker leadership in 1738 admonished them “to keep a friendly correspondence with the native Indians, giving no occasion for offence” and to emulate William Penn’s example by always purchasing new settlements from the natives. They were further reminded that the province of Virginia had “made an agreement with the natives to go as far as the mountains and no farther, and you are over and beyond the mountains, therefore out of that agreement; by which you lie open to the insults and incursions of the Southern Indians...(Kercheval 1833)
Jeremiah York was perhaps the first known permanent settler in the vicinity of present-day NCTC. Tax records show he had been living in Chester County, Pennsylvania since about 1718 (O’Dell 1995), but about 1730 he disappears from the tax rolls there. Records indicate a Jeremiah York living in the Monocosie Hundred near Pipe Creek north of present-day Frederick Maryland in the early 1730s (an old bible record indicates a son born there in 1732), but if this is the same York, he is not listed in the tax list of 1733, suggesting a possible date for his move west into Virginia, about the same time as the Van Meters and others from the Monocosie Hundred. He claimed the land within a tight meander of the Cohongoroota several miles north of Packhorse Ford that would soon be called Terrapin Neck. Old friends and neighbors of York from Pennsylvania settled nearby on the Maryland side of the river, including Samuel Finley and the Alred family; the Yorks and Alreds would later settle in North Carolina together as well. 18
1731 - Joist Hite, 45 years old, having listened to the tales of the open lands in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to sell his property near Philadelphia to a John Pawling for £540 pounds. The Van Meter’s large land grant in Virginia greatly interested him, so Hite and about 16 other families packed up and headed south through the wilderness, widening the old Indian trails where necessary to make room for their heavily laden wagons. He and the Van Meters soon struck a deal (some genealogical sources have described Joist as either John Van Meter’s cousin or nephew; other documents suggest they were just well acquainted), and the Van Meter brothers sold him their claim to the 40,000 acres granted them the previous year, possibly because of nervousness over the existing dispute over title, or maybe it had been their plan to sell out all along. John Van Meter was perhaps tired of the added “abuses” that inevitably came along with the administration of land grants and settlers, and was happy to be relieved of the burden, especially when it put money in his pocket. He was nearly 50 years old and had been moving west to the frontier his entire adult life. His younger brother and partner Isaac had decided to stay in New Jersey rather than settle on his grant in Virginia, so Isaac wasn’t going to be much help. (According to fairly well documented family lore, Isaac later returned to Virginia and was killed by Indians during the French and Indian War in 1757.) The land the Van Meters had already patented was also sold to Hite 3 years later in 1734, though they retained and lived on several large parcels in the Shepherdstown area. Hite also had an additional 100,000 acre grant in the Shenandoah Valley issued to him by the Virginia authorities that he shared with a group of partners. Hite already had a head start in attracting the required number of settlers to his land grants with the 16 families who had traveled with him from Philadelphia; they all had lived out of their wagons near the Van Meter cabin and Pack Horse Ford for a year while homes were built about 5 miles south of present-day Winchester on the upper Opequon. Joist and Anna Maria’s children were still fairly young at the time: John was 17, Jacob was 12, Isaac was 10, Abraham was 2, and Joseph was a newborn (Jones et. al 1979). Over the years the Hite and Van Meter families would develop close ties from numerous marriages.
In addition to settling a specified number of families, Hite and his partners were required to have the 140,000 acres surveyed by December 25, 1735 to retain control of the grant, the Virginia Council having granted a two-year extension to the original Van Meter Orders of Council. Thus began the anxious process of locating and surveying land and finding settlers to reach their quota. After setting up a land office (and operating an inn) south of present-day Winchester, Virginia, in addition to trying to attract new settlers and buyers into their area, the Hites began surveying and selling property to people in the Valley who were already living there, offering a title and a bond on a scrap of paper should the title ever proved defective. In return, the settlers had to pay a base fee, usually £3 pounds per hundred acres (which was six times the price charged by the Northern Neck Proprietary or the Virginia Council), and an annual “quit rent”. This may have been unpopular with some settlers, who probably were familiar with the Fairfax claim and were waiting to work with Fairfax for title. It must have been a bit of a shock to those already living in the area for a newcomer like Hite to appear in their midst holding an exclusive claim to 140,000 acres granted by the Virginia Council, and asking them to purchase the property they lived on from him. The Hites apparently were not particularly well organized and acted more in the manner of traveling land “peddlers”. Lord Baltimore in Maryland and William 19
Penn in Pennsylvania also considered this area as a possible expansion of their grants, and most of the settlers had actually come from those colonies. It would take a great leap of faith to buy land from the Hites. On the other hand, the Hites were in the neighborhood, the settlers could receive what looked like a bona fide title to the land without traveling to Williamsburg, they could pick and choose from among the choicest properties without regard to size or shape, and they were offered a form of title insurance. If a settler also happened to dislike the feudal Lords of Great Britain and their propensity to hand out property to relatives and privileged favorites, a fellow immigrant settler like themselves may have been seen as a more worthy person to conduct business with. Unfortunately, it was later found that the Hites and their partners kept poor records and conducted many shady transactions, including the recording of poor or fictitious surveys, the erasing of names on documents, and the like. Many of their land transactions were little more than a verbal barter of various goods. It was found later that fewer than a third of their supposed buyers actually lived on one large grant. It should be noted that the Hites were not particularly unusual in this regard, many other colonial land speculators had similar problems and solutions to them (Couper 1952).
1732 - Robert Carter, Fairfax’s agent in Virginia, died. Fairfax lost an influential and powerful ally within Virginia’s governing Council, though in fact Carter was a mixed blessing, having enriched himself and his heirs with land in the Northern Neck, and leaving administration of the Proprietary in some disarray with his passing (see Brown 1965). At one point, Robert Carter had amassed over 330,000 acres and owned about 1000 slaves (Wiencik 1988, p.13).
Nearer the head of Chesapeake Bay, Lord Baltimore and the Calverts took note of the tide of immigrants coming out of Pennsylvania looking for land. The Treaty of Albany with the natives notwithstanding, the leaders of the Maryland colony, “being desirous to increase the number of honest people within our province”, offered land on very good terms between the Potomac and Susquehanna Rivers in order to capture some of the immigrants heading south into Virginia. A family could get 200 acres for free, with quit rents waived for three years, while single men or women could get 100 acres under the same terms (Md Archives vol. 28, p25-26). The measurement standard for honesty wasn’t mentioned, but probably had something to do with not being an Indian or squatter.
1733 - Lord Fairfax, still in Great Britain, petitioned the King to stop the colony from issuing grants within his proprietary, and to finally! conduct a survey for a legal description. This was granted. To ensure that this ruling would not be ignored, Lord Fairfax decided to deliver the text of the decree himself by visiting Virginia - that wild backwater colony across the Atlantic - for the first time. Unfortunately for the later settlers on Terrapin Neck, he didn’t arrive in Virginia until two years later.
1734 - A young Thomas Swearingen and his wife Sarah sold 68 acres, “part of a tract of land called Forrest lying in Prince George County” he had inherited from his father several years before (O’Dell 1995). It’s unknown if he was thinking about life in Virginia at this time, or whether he was living on his now-patented Fellfoot property south of present-day Keedysville on 20
the Little Antietam, but those new grants available across the river in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia were undoubtedly being discussed by many young men in Maryland.
This year the first Hite survey near Terrapin Neck was conducted. On May 30, surveyor Robert Brooke surveyed an 834 acre tract on the Cohongoroota (Potomac) River adjacent to Terrapin Neck between Shepherd Island and the mouth of Rocky Marsh Run (then known as Jones Mill Run). This was surveyed for three partners--Charles Anderson, Indian trader and negotiator from the Monocacy settlements in Maryland, Joseph Mounts, deputy of Constable Van Meter in Maryland, and Josiah Jones, who also had another 164-acre survey in his name alone a few miles upstream “being in the first large bottom below the mouth of Opeckon Creek” (copies of surveys are at Berkeley County Historical Society’s Belle Boyd House in Martinsburg, WV). Jones had lived there long enough to have already built a road and at least started construction on a mill near present-day Scrabble just west of NCTC. The presence of this mill and several others soon underway in the area about the same time suggests that settlers and grain fields were already becoming common. Anderson, Mounts and Jones probably had claimed this parcel several years before expecting to buy it from their old friends the Van Meters, who were setting up operations on a 1,786-acre parcel several miles to the south along the marshy upper reaches of what was then called Jones Mill Run, but the Van Meters had instead sold out to Joist Hite 3 years before. This was a case where the Hites surveyed 834 acres that were already claimed, and then sold the occupants the land and provided a title bond in case the title should ever prove defective (Hyman 1996).
Anderson, Mounts and Jones had moved into a wild country that still included significant numbers of bison, elk, bear, beaver, wolves, cougars - and Native Americans who traveled frequently through the area along their ancient trails. Much of the lower Shenandoah Valley to the west of Terrapin Neck was a prairie with scattered woodlots; larger woodlands tended to be in the vicinity of rivers and streams and along the ridges bordering the Valley. The rich limestone soils of Terrapin Neck would have tended to grow a mixed oak-hickory forest cover very quickly barring any significant disturbance, just as it does today (the woodland around the NCTC campus was an open pasture in the 1940s!) What did Anderson, Mounts and Jones find so attractive when they claimed this property? You can get some idea of what the Terrapin Neck area looked like by examining the text of their 1734 survey:
1734 Survey near Terrapin Neck
Surveyed for Charles Anderson, Josiah Jones, and Joseph Mounts 834 Acres of Land Beginning at a Walnut Tree Standing at the Mouth of the Said Jones Mill Creek and on the West Side Cohongolooto Riv. And Thence down the Meanders Thereof 413 Poles to a wt. Oak opposite to an Island. Thence on the high land round the Several courses following Viz. So 40 po: to a Hicory. S 38 E 80 po: to a forked wt. Oak. So 26 po: to a large Hicory. S 40 W 183 po: to a bla. oak. N 60 W 46 to a bla. Oak. N 72 po. to a wt. oak on a knowl. N 70W 72 to a bla. Oak. S 50 W 88 to a bla. oak. S 70 W 74 to a large w. Oak. N 75 W 62 po. to a bla: Oak. S 62 W 80 po: to a wt. Oak. S 25 W 80 to a Locust Tree. N 70 W 19 po: to a Hicory. West 66 po: to a wt. Oak by a Spring. S E 80 po: to a wt. oak. NW 26 pole over the Mill Branch to a Walnut Tree beyond a Meadow. N35 E 40 po: to a Hicory. N 20 E 240 to a wt. Oak. And Thence N 40 W 230 pole to the Beginning This 30th day of May 1734.
Rob’t Brooke 21
The island referred to above is now known as Shepherd Island, the Cohongoloota (various spellings) refers to the original name of the Potomac River, and Jones Mill Creek is now known as Rocky Marsh Run. A pole is 16.5 feet. Note that these same tree species are still commonly found on NCTC property. The Berkeley County Historical Society recently placed the “Jones Mill” site on the National Register of Historic Places - today a sign marks the site near present day Scrabble. The eastern portion of this 1734 patent is now occupied by NCTC.
The pattern seen in these early surveys shows that the new settlers, who could still pick from among the choicest properties, chose sites that contained a spring or stream, had access to river transportation routes, and probably had a few open areas for establishing crops. The text of the actual grant from Governor Gooch gives several other descriptive clues including “white oak against an island a little below the ford and running thence into the woods”, and “red oak in barren ground” (a meadow) located on the hilltop area east of the present-day NCTC entrance. Open areas were attractive if the soils were adequate for crops, but the new owners would have wanted plenty of trees nearby for building cabins, barns and other structures, as well as for firewood. The trees in the above survey were not likely part of a continuous closed-canopy oak-hickory forest, but perhaps were contained within thinly scattered woodlots, or along the edges of larger forest patches that were growing in the bottomlands. Fire, and grazing by herds of elk and buffalo were likely the primary means of retaining open sites on the rich soils near Terrapin Neck prior to - and during - the settlement by Europeans. The strange shape of the Anderson, Mounts and Jones survey shows their strategy of minimizing the amount of land they had to pay for, but maximizing the land area that they could utilize, by acquiring the water resources- including all the major springs- in the area. Another settler was unlikely to take up land next door and begin complaining about cattle trespass and wood removal unless there was a reliable source of water available. (This was still a common strategy used by settlers in the American west in the 19th century as well; by claiming the 160 acres around a spring, homesteaders could potentially have at their disposal many thousands of acres of semi-arid land). The 834-acre tract was patented the same year by Richard Poulson, Mounts and Jones, who within several years began subdividing and selling portions of it. (Richard Polson is listed as a taxable in the Monocosie Hundred in 1733, another former Maryland neighbor of John Van Meter). The patent signed by Governor Gooch of the Virginia colony gave them a very strong legal claim of ownership to the property; they had achieved the goal of many of the early settlers by acquiring a patented tract of land. Why did Poulson take the place of Anderson on the patent? After all, Anderson’s Indian trading post partner Israel Friend had also taken up land nearby along both sides of the river south of present-day Shepherdstown, probably in the 1720s. (Friend’s title to the Maryland land apparently came from several generous Indian chiefs who considered him their friend - see Diller, undated. Thomas Swearingen would be executor of Friend’s will in 1749). Anderson and Israel Friend were both descended from a Swedish Lutheran colony - New Sweden - along the Delaware River. And since Anderson’s middle name was Mounts, one can assume he was closely related to deputy Joseph Mounts, one of the other patentees. (A Christopher Mounts, also related, had acted as an Indian interpreter for the Maryland Council back in August of 1700, further evidence that the Mounts and Anderson families had had several generations of frontier interactions with Native Americans, and may have derived a substantial portion of their incomes from these relationships - Md Archives v25, p.104). Anderson may have been nervous over the
22
Hite / Fairfax land dispute, and perhaps an agrarian lifestyle was ultimately unsuitable to someone who had spent so many years as an Indian trader on the frontier, and land speculation was his only real interest in the Virginia property. It could also have something to do with the fact that Anderson was in the Orange County, Virginia “gaol” by September 1735 for the murder of David Hopkins (O’Dell 1995), the charges brought by one Morgan Morgan and several other prominent early settlers in the area.
23
Robert Brooke completed several other surveys for the Hites in the area the same year (copies of these surveys are located at the Berkeley County Historical Society’s Belle Boyd House in Martinsburg, WV). In April, he surveyed 210 acres for Richard Morgan just north of present-day Shepherdstown. (This parcel was purchased by Van Swearingen 10 years later, and Thomas Swearingen, Jr. would eventually marry Morgan’s daughter). Brooke also surveyed a tract for a Welton in the same area. Later in October Brooke came back and surveyed 222 acres for Thomas Shepherd and his new wife Elizabeth Van Meter (who was related to the Hites - a relationship that likely played a factor in later legal proceedings on Terrapin Neck), to which Shepherd added a gristmill and sawmill some time later. Twenty years later part of this tract would be laid out into the town lots of Mecklenburg (Shepherdstown). The Morgan, Welton and Shepherd families, all of Welsh origin, had divided up and were utilizing the water resources of what is now referred to as Town Run and its small upstream, spring-fed tributaries, one of which begins in present-day Morgan’s Grove Park.
Where Are the Native Americans?
Archeological evidence on the NCTC property has shown that Native Americans utilized the site intermittently upwards of 8000 years. Dating of cultural artifacts suggests that regular occupancy of the site ended about 1300 A.D.; this matches a regional pattern characterized by pronounced changes in the distribution and subsistence strategies of earlier cultural groups often correlated with a climate phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age. The very few European accounts of the area between the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers in the 1720s indicate the area was utilized by small groups of natives for occasional seasonal subsistence including trapping, hunting, and the setting of fish traps to catch springtime sucker runs near present-day Harper’s Ferry. The I-81 corridor about 10 miles west of NCTC today roughly follows a major trail from New York to the Carolinas once used by various groups including the Lenni-Lenape, Shawnee and Catawba tribes; another ancient trail crossed the river at Pack Horse ford about a mile south of Shepherdstown. There seems not to have been any large or long-term settlements of Native Americans in the Shepherdstown area when Europeans began moving into the valley; the Maryland Council in the early 1700s spoke of Indian towns at Conestoga, Pennsylvania, the Shawnee town at present-day Oldtown, Maryland, a fort near Great Falls on the Potomac and several other tribes with towns around the Chesapeake Bay. A group of Tuscarora Indians, after fleeing the Carolinas sometime after 1715, lived at the site of present-day Martinsburg for a time (some accounts suggest they moved there after 1730), then left just prior to the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Note that these tribal names were often designations given to them by the Europeans – kinship patterns were complex and the natives themselves may have felt little connection to their assigned group.
Note: the community of Shepherdstown has been referred to by a number of names over the years. From the 1720s to the 1750s it was commonly referred to as Pack Horse Ford, in reference to the ancient river crossing about a mile south of the present community. For a time it was called Swearingen’s Ferry, after Thomas Swearingen started a ferry in 1755. After 1762 it was legally known as Mecklenburg, or Maclinborough, using a variety of spellings. By the time of the Revolutionary War it was more commonly referred to as Shepherds Town. This name was given official sanction by the state authorities in 1798 (Dandridge 1910).
The Swearingen brothers of Maryland, Thomas and Van, were likely exploring the Virginia side of the river at this time. The actual date of one or both of the brothers living full time on the Virginia side of the Potomac is unknown, but was most likely in the early 1740s. Thomas with 24
his wife Sarah bought and sold several properties in Maryland between 1732 and 1744. By 1734 Thomas had patented his Fellfoot property near Keedysville, Maryland, was married and 26 years old. He was 11 years older than his brother Van, who was then a 15-year-old teenager. Thomas was probably the dominant male figure in Van’s early life, as their father had died 8 years before. They likely had spent considerable time with their uncle Van Swearingen and his family who eventually established a home a few miles north of present-day Sharpsburg, not far from Thomas Swearingen’s Fellfoot property on the Little Antietam (young Van would marry his first cousin from this family later). The Swearingen family had been involved with Maryland colonial politics and land use issues for several generations. Their great-grandfather’s home in the then state capital of St. Mary’s City at the mouth of the Potomac River was used as a meeting place for writing many of the early Maryland laws; he had served as Sheriff for a time, and ran a lodging and coffee house for the colony’s leaders and merchants. The family was originally from Holland but became British citizens after arrival in the New World. Later generations were pragmatic in their choice of religious affiliation, abandoning Catholicism in the face of certain persecution by the colonial authorities of Maryland who wielded power through the Anglican Church. They eventually became moderately wealthy slave owners and undoubtedly were involved with the growing of tobacco on their lands. Each generation moved further up from the mouth of the Potomac River, and Van’s father and uncles had several plantations near present-day Washington DC and Frederick, Maryland (see http:/genforum.genealogy.com/swearingen/)
A busy wagon road from Conestoga, Pennsylvania to near present-day Winchester, Virginia was available for settlers to use by this time and soon afterward settlers could travel by wagon from Philadelphia all the way to the Carolinas on a road now known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. To cross the Potomac, they could choose to ford near present-day Williamsport, Maryland, or cross at Pack Horse Ford a mile south of Thomas Shepherd’s property when the water was low enough. A 1734 survey map in Virginia shows a ferry operating just south of Pack Horse Ford near the mouth of Antietam Creek on the Maryland side of the Potomac to Knott Island on the Virginia side, operated by a Samuel Taylor and used to haul iron ore for the new iron industry developing on or near Israel Friend’s property. This would soon become the thriving mining and iron-producing town of Antietam, built near the ore deposit near the mouth of the creek of the same name. The ferry here may have been available for the occasional settler or traveler wishing to keep their feet dry, but because the colony of Virginia required public ferry operators to be licensed by an act of the Virginia Assembly, it could not legally be used for public transportation. Without a license, authorities wouldn’t authorize new roads or require road maintenance to access it, important considerations if it was to be a money-making venture. The commercial possibilities for ferries were probably just beginning to be realized as hundreds of newly-arrived immigrants, both German and Scotch-Irish, were spreading out across Pennsylvania and traveling south along the wagon road west of the Blue Ridge down into the Shenandoah Valley. It has been estimated that 85% of the settlers moving into what became Frederick County, Virginia came from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and northern Maryland (O’Dell 1995). 25
1735 - In May Lord Fairfax finally arrived in the Virginia colony for the first time to deliver the decree from the King to stop issuing patents within his Proprietary. You can imagine the stir in Williamsburg and the thoughts of those who had purchased property within the Fairfax claim. It was one thing to ignore a Lord on the other side of the ocean, but a different thing entirely when he was in town with an entourage and a handful of documents bearing the King’s seal. Fairfax and his agents, including his recently-hired cousin William, immediately began to make plans for a survey of his Proprietary, and were inquiring about who had been given land within the Proprietary by the Council without their consent. The Van Meter/Hite grant was no doubt given prominent mention.
By July, mill owner Josiah Jones, one of the new owners of the patented tract near Terrapin Neck, was dead, leaving behind a wife and two children. His widow was ordered to appear in court to explain what she planned to do with her portion of the estate, including the mill. By September, Charles Anderson, one of the men named on the original survey for the property that became NCTC, was in jail for murder. The charges were eventually dropped, and Anderson moved to Oldtown further up the Potomac (O’Dell 1995). If slaves could find a refuge there with the Indians, perhaps he could too.
December 25 of this year marked the end of the Hite’s 4-year period for legally surveying land to include in their grant. It seems they tried to sneak in at least one more survey, as will be seen - the deadline had been extended several times in the past so they seem to have assumed that it would be extended again whenever the assembly got a chance to take up the issue.
1736 - In January, a Jonathon Simmons bought about 315 acres on the eastern side of the Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent (now the Springwood portion of NCTC that includes the campus) from Joseph Mounts for 30 pounds (Orange County DB 2, p. 385). Richard Poulson was living there at the time near the island (O’Dell 1995). It is unknown if Simmons lived on his new property after the purchase, but it seems likely.
A Hite survey of 1200 acres including all of Terrapin Neck east of and adjacent to Jonathon Simmons new place was (probably) surveyed on May 21; note that this took place 6 months after the Hite deadline. (A map of this survey is located for the year 1777 later in this document). A John Browning, living in what is now Cecil County, Maryland not far south of Philadelphia, received a title bond of 200 pounds from the Hites almost six months later on November 6th for this property, suggesting that the survey was not conducted at the behest of Mr. Browning, but was undertaken by the Hites on behalf of someone else or with the hope of eventually finding someone to buy it. According to Virginia law Browning was then legally required to settle on and improve Terrapin Neck to retain title - he never did, but instead seems to have lived in northeastern Maryland until he died there five years later. The surveyor hired by the Hites on Terrapin Neck was James Wood, surveyor for Orange County, and later there is some controversy over whether he surveyed the previous November 10, as was alleged in court later by the Hites (albeit with no supporting documentation), or whether the survey was conducted on the date it was written in his log book, which was the following May 21 (Hyman 26
1996). Wood went on to later become the first clerk of the new court in Frederick County, and is known as the founder of Winchester, Virginia.
Why was a non-resident John Browning able to purchase this 1200-acre tract on Terrapin Neck, rather than the people who were (probably) living there? Assuming that Jeremiah York actually did settle there after 1730 (he disappears from Pennsylvania records after 1729, and is mentioned as living on Terrapin Neck by at least 1741 in a later court deposition by Anthony Turner, who came to the area in 1740 as a boy - see Chalkley vol. 2, p.95), and making a further assumption that later repeated court testimony was correct in showing that Browning never settled Terrapin Neck, we can speculate about what may have happened. Jeremiah York was either 1) ignored by the Hites and not consulted about purchasing the land he had claimed - this seems unlikely because of the surveys done by Brooke in the area in 1734; York also left south-eastern Pennsylvania about the same time as the Hites, suggesting they were acquainted; or more likely, 2) York refused or did not pursue a Hite survey and patent, possibly because of the invalid survey after December 25, or knowledge of the Fairfax claim and Fairfax’s recent visit to Virginia, or some other misgiving or falling out with the Hites--and the Hites ignored York’s unofficial “tomahawk rights” and sold it to Browning despite it already being claimed and possibly occupied.
York was under no obligation to buy from the Hites; remember the Hites were allowed to distribute only a maximum of 30,000 acres between the Shenandoah and the Opequon rivers before a December 1735 deadline, which had now passed. York could very well have been waiting to pursue a grant directly from the Virginia Council and Governor Gooch, or from Lord Fairfax (he did receive a Fairfax grant for the land finally in 1751). He could bide his time on his property in the Monocacy Hundred near Pipestone Creek while the dispute was being settled. York and Browning undoubtedly knew each other, since both were from the area southwest of Philadelphia near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Ironically, many settlers left the border area between Maryland and Pennsylvania south of Philadelphia to escape uncertain property titles because of a boundary dispute between Lord Baltimore and William Penn, who both claimed the area. York was no doubt chary about committing his money to an uncertain property transaction by this time.
Even if York and others had begun negotiating with Hite over a land purchase, the issue was rendered moot--the Hites and other speculators and settlers were prevented from patenting any more property between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers because of a Fairfax lawsuit about this time. This lawsuit effectively eliminated any settler’s ability to acquire a clear legal title to land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers for at least the next 15 years.
Any contest between York and Browning over title to Terrapin Neck had to wait until the dispute between Hite and Fairfax was settled.
Progress was being made in describing the boundary of the Fairfax claim: the long-awaited search for the headwaters of the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, which would define the boundaries of Fairfax’s Northern Neck Proprietary, started in October and took about 9 weeks. 27
The commission had two “teams”, being composed of members representing both Fairfax and the Virginia Council. After completion of their arduous survey, another year was spent drafting their separate reports and maps.
John Van Meter had exasperations this year beyond those associated with land grants. Consider the deposition of his daughter at an Orange County Court hearing:
Mary Jones of this county declares that on 13 Oct Robert Yeldall was with Cornelius Newkirk, and Robert Yelddall entered the house of John Vanmetre and asked Vanmetre's wife for a botle he left there. The woman answered that she did not know of any botle. He began to swear and say he wood have his botle, except she would cheat him of it, and if she did, he did not mater it, they were knaves, they had swore the peace against James Davis, but he would stand by him, and that James Davis was able to drive them and all their generations, and if he wood stand by him, and after they had been gone a while, they came back to the house again. Robert Yelddall rod up to the house door, and the fore part of his horse entered the inside of the house, and John Vanmeter struck the horse back. Mary (M) Jones. Sworn before Morgan Morgan. (Orange County Judgments, 1736; James Davis was Van Meter’s son-in-law)
1738 - There were still some disputes between agents of the Virginia Council and the Fairfax team, so the results of the 1736 survey of the Proprietary were carried to England for a decision. Lord Fairfax agreed to honor all Crown grants issued by the Virginia Council within his Proprietary, including the Van Meter/Hite grants. The Terrapin Neck area was now included in the new county of Frederick, Virginia, there now being enough people in the lower Shenandoah Valley to warrant a court house of their own. Thomas Shepherd petitioned the Orange County, Virginia Court about this time, requesting to be discharged as “Constable Sherundo” as soon as Richard Morgan was sworn in his place (O’Dell 1995); in October Shepherd was also paid a bounty of 14 shillings for a wolf’s head by certificate of Richard Morgan (FC VA Court Journal, in Smyth 1909).
1739 - From the time of the first settlements in the New World, Europeans had a strong interest in American flora and fauna, with many wealthy gentlemen becoming avid collectors. By this year John Clayton of Gloucester County, Virginia produced the first taxonomic work from America, entitled Flora Virginica.
Joist Hite’s wife Anna Maria died at 52 years of age. Joist remarried two years later to Maria Magdalena, widow of his late friend Christian Neuschwanger. Their marriage included a prenuptial agreement specifying that she would provide love, obedience, cattle, money and other household stuff, in return for love, faithfulness and a home (Jones et. al 1979).
1741 - John Browning died at his home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (actually in the northeastern corner of Maryland, not far from Philadelphia); he was only 36 years old. He willed “his” 1200-acre Terrapin Neck tract in Virginia, sold to him 5 years before by the Hites, to three of his children: George, Nicholas, and Rosamond (she eventually married a William Keating). The Hite-Fairfax dispute was still unresolved at this time, but luckily for Jeremiah York, there are no records of John Browning attempting to settle or press his claim to Terrapin Neck prior to 28
his death, though he apparently considered it valuable enough to pass on to his children. It would be more than 40 years before his grandchildren suddenly took an interest in the property again, as will be seen.
1742 - Peter Beller, a German shoemaker, and his wife Catherine, with 6-year old son Jacob were living on the patented property Jonathon Simmons had purchased 6 years previously near Terrapin Neck (now the Springwood portion of NCTC). They eventually purchased the property from Jonathon Simmons - but the transaction wasn’t recorded at the courthouse until sometime after Simmons death four years later (FCDB 4, p.121-123). Beller may have lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with Dunkers around 1728, and followed a common German settlement pattern by continuing south into the Shenandoah Valley. There were other German Protestant groups settling just to the west on the other side of the Opequon River, an area off-limits to the Hites. Many German settlers preferred to continue on toward North Carolina in order to avoid the contentious land ownership disputes between Hite and Fairfax, and others (Couper 1952). Beller probably followed the typical German style of growing crops and animal husbandry, and likely had a cabin and a barn on the property that would become NCTC (see chapter in Kercheval 1833).
1743 - Van Swearingen, 24, married his 21 year old first cousin Sarah Swearingen. Sarah and her family had likely been living about 5 miles north of Terrapin Neck across the river in Maryland by this time, not far from Thomas Swearingen’s Fellfoot property south of Keedysville where Van had likely resided with his brother. Van and Sarah’s children eventually include:
Josiah - b. 28 March, 1744, oldest son
Rebecca - b. 2 Oct 1745 (she apparently died young)
Hezekiah - b. 7 Feb 1747
Luranna - b. 13 Nov. 1748
Drusilla - b. 29 Oct 1750
Thomas - b. 22 Nov 1752
Indian claims and complaints now being entirely ignored, settlement of the riverside land in Maryland across from Thomas Shepherd’s little community on the Potomac had been proceeding steadily for almost a decade, with several surveys already completed in the area now known as Ferry Hill. John Van Meter hired a survey for a 160 acre tract on the Potomac on the Maryland side of the river known as Pell Mell, which was just northeast of an adjacent tract downstream already surveyed and patented known as Antietam Bottom. Van Meter instructed the surveyor Joseph Chapline not to mark the western corner of Pell Mell - a black walnut tree on the riverbank - until after the lines of Antietam Bottom (patented in 1739 by John Moore) were known, so there wouldn’t be any controversy over the boundary. Unfortunately the walnut tree was never marked and sure enough it later caused a lot of controversy (Fred. Cty Md DB J, p 939, deposition of Joseph Chapline). 1744 - The newlywed Van Swearingens bought a 210 acre Hite-surveyed, patented tract from Richard Morgan for 110 pounds just north of the Pack Horse Ford community (now part of the Cress Creek development), which became their first family residence in Virginia (FCDB 1, p.116). The deed refers to Richard Morgan as a “Gentleman”, while Van is described as a “Farmer”. Van’s older brother Thomas would acquire an adjacent 478 acres from a Fairfax grant six years later, site of a conspicuous circle of raised earth used by the native Indians sometime in the past (Kercheval 1833), that later became known as the Bellevue property. Local folklore includes the tale of a Delaware Indian chief who was supposedly captured in the vicinity by enemy Catawba Indians, and buried alive near the spring on what became the Swearingen estate. The spring on the property spurts instead of flows, according to the tale, because of the beating heart of the buried chief (Heatwole 1995). Thomas established a ferry across the Potomac on this property by 1753, and eventually owned plantations on both sides of the Potomac River.
Although there are no records that describe the lifestyle of the new Swearingen plantations in Virginia, from descriptions of common practices at the time we can surmise that the children, many of the household chores, as well as the farm animals and crops, were all attended to by slaves. Tobacco and other crops and animals were grown and sold for profit, but much of the land--and much of the effort--would necessarily have been directed toward the growing of corn, wheat, hogs, sheep, and beef, which formed the basis of their subsistence. Tobacco was the currency of choice for paying taxes and fines for several decades in colonial Virginia. The financial system then prevalent has been likened to growing cash in your back yard. Landowners were assessed not only on real estate, but also on personal property such as horses and slaves. By Virginia law, planters were required to transport tobacco to a public inspection warehouse located in each county. Planters storing tobacco at the warehouse were given a receipt, which could be used as legal tender. Col. James Wood, clerk of the new Frederick County, in his Virginia Fee Book for 1744 recorded the Tobacco Assessment for selected settlers in the Terrapin Neck area as shown in Table 1.
Even though Van Swearingen was a “Farmer” and Richard Morgan was a “Gentleman”, Van appears to have nearly double the property worth taxing compared to Morgan, and even was assessed a higher fee than his neighbors the Van Meters. He owned only 222 acres, suggesting much of his wealth may have been in slaves and livestock. This list is missing some important people connected with the Terrapin Neck - Pack Horse Ford area at the time, such as Thomas Shepherd, who owned hundreds of acres of patented land, a gristmill and perhaps a sawmill by this time , and Thomas Swearingen, who
29
Table 1. 1744 Frederick County Tobacco Assessment
NAME Pounds of Tobacco Assessed
Peter Beller 50
Joseph Mounts 96
Richard Poulson 5
Van Swearingen 190
Jonathon Simons (Simmons?) ye infant 560
Israel Friend 268
John and Jacob Hite 449
Joist Hite 109
Richard Morgan 105
John Welton 130
Isaac, Henry and Jacob Van Meter total 158
from Kerns, n.d.30
would own a mill, much land, and a ferry operation in the years to come. Why is Van assessed but not his older brother? Thomas Swearingen was probably still living a few miles away across the river in Maryland on his Fellfoot property south of present-day Keedysville at the time of the assessment, but in May of 1744 he was the overseer of a new road being built from Thomas Shepherd’s mill southwest to Jacob Hite’s (present day Route 480), and took in some orphans associated with Jones Mill soon after. Terrapin Neck settlers also missing from the list include Jeremiah York - or anyone named Browning, suggesting there were minimal improvements on the disputed tract. The clerk of court, James Wood, may have known that York did not hold a patent to the land he (probably) lived on in Terrapin Neck, since it was Wood himself who had conducted the land survey there for the Hites ten years before. It is unknown why the Browning heirs were not assessed instead, unless the ownership question between Hite and Fairfax placed these people on a separate list. Did Frederick County assess only those who held a patented tract in 1744, or did Wood keep a separate list for those living on unpatented land? Researcher Kerns also noted some prominent individuals missing from the list for the Cacapon area for this year as well, and speculated that some settlers were too new to have come to the attention of the County authorities, or perhaps part of the Fee Book was missing. At any rate, this list strongly suggests that tobacco was a significant crop grown in the Terrapin Neck area at the time, though of course they didn’t have to grow tobacco, and may have bartered other goods to acquire enough tobacco to pay their assessments.
Another Indian Treaty was negotiated this year, called the Treaty of Lancaster. Indian negotiators, again led by the Iroquois who claimed to speak for all the tribes of the mid-Atlantic region, at first strongly asserted their claim for lands west of the Blue Ridge by right of conquest (not by settlement, because there hadn’t been any permanent Iroquois-related settlements in this area for some time), but ultimately signed over their rights to all lands between the Blue Ridge and Ohio River for £400 pounds. They were still allowed to travel their Indian Road between New York and the Carolinas, now roughly the route of Interstate 81 (see Md Archives v28, p336). This would now allow the legal settlement of the Maryland side of the River across from Shepherdstown, at least in terms of having accommodated (at least one of) the tribes.
Chapter 3 The Swearingens Become Prominent Under Lord Fairfax Rule
1745 - After years of dispute, the Fairfax Northern Neck Proprietary was defined and reaffirmed by the Privy Council in England, confirming the “first fountain” of the Cohongoroota as the head of the Potomac River, and making Fairfax the owner of over 5 million acres of Virginia! This essentially created two separate colonies within Virginia, at least in terms of acquiring a land grant, with Fairfax now in charge of all grants between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. A survey was ordered to mark the western boundary that became known as the Fairfax Line, a boundary line running NW from near the present-day Big Meadow area of Shenandoah National Park to the head spring of the Potomac near present-day Davis, West Virginia; the surveyors laid a stone monument at the head spring, known as the Fairfax stone, and its various replacements can still be seen today. The surveyors included Peter Jefferson (father of the third president), and Robert Brooke (the son of the surveyor for the 1734 Anderson, Mounts and Jones survey near Terrapin Neck). This created a situation where the Hites and Fairfax now “owned” some of the same land. The Hites and Fairfax got in a squabble and Fairfax refused to honor Hite titles 31
despite what he agreed to in 1738 (Couper 1952). Hite apparently had taken a long time to grudgingly provide to Fairfax names of settlers on lands Hite had surveyed, along with a description of the property boundaries. When he finally did provide them, the records and property descriptions were terrible; Fairfax felt disinclined to issue grants to what he considered fictitious people living on property with uncertain boundaries, and also wondered why the name “Hite” frequently appeared in the ledger obviously replacing a number of other erased names. Later court documents show that a high percentage of the acreage did go to the Hite family, though this was by no means a transgression of the terms of the 1730 grant purchased from the Van Meters. Using the names and acreages listed on page 174 in McKay (1951), Jost Hite’s name is the “assignee” associated with 12 of 52 parcels surveyed and patented in 1734 under the Van Meter grant, amounting to 18,869 acres, or 41% of the total acreage of 46,248 acres. There were 36 other family names in the list, and if legitimate, this was 6 more than was strictly needed. The other 100,000-acre grant that Hite held with several partners was perhaps more of an issue, as it was found that only about a third of the listed families were actually living on the property in question.
Fairfax also objected to the Hite surveys for their tendency to lock up the water resources of an area. Many of the property boundaries of the Hite-surveyed lands included only the long, thin bottomlands bordering a stream, plus any adjacent choice uplands including the nearby springs. This made it difficult for later settlers to utilize adjacent property because of the lack of water. For example, in the Shepherdstown area John Van Meter acquired a long, thin parcel totaling 1,786 acres that included most of the narrow watershed of what is now known as Rocky Marsh Run, while the original Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent included extensive Potomac River frontage, the lower portion of Rocky Marsh Run, and an irregular shape designed to acquire the several major springs in the area. Richard Morgan acquired a skinny 290-acre patent between and perpendicular to the two grants listed above which included a spring and a meadow that ran into Rocky Marsh Run (now the site of The Conservation Fund’s Freshwater Institute). Israel Friend’s 300-acre patent was a long, narrow bottomland tract adjacent to the Potomac just downstream from Packhorse Ford on the Virginia side and was cited repeatedly by Fairfax as an example of just what he was complaining about. Fairfax preferred what he called a “regular survey” that followed the Virginia Assembly order of Oct. 22, 1712 which required that surveyed parcels should have a breadth of at least one-third of their length (Brown 1965).
Because his original legal land grant description referred to “all that entire Tract, Territory, or porcon of Land situate, lying and beeing in America, and bounded by and within the heads of the Rivers of Rappahannock and Patawomecke...”, Fairfax encouraged everyone to begin using the name “Potomac” for the river north of Harpers Ferry, instead of the old name of Cohongoroota, which was of Indian derivation from the sound of a honking goose. Lawyers could potentially create mischief for his newly-won Proprietary if the boundary for his claim was known by Cohongoroota rather than Potomac, so the original Indian name had to go.
Closer to home, Thomas Swearingen was appointed guardian of John and Sarah Jones, orphans of the deceased mill owner Josiah Jones and their more recently deceased mother (O’Dell 1995). Thomas and his family had apparently moved to the Jones Mill property near Terrapin Neck shortly before this time; Thomas Swearingen and his heirs would own and run the “Jones” mill near present-day Scrabble for more than 70 years. The mill location was adjacent to the 32
Cohongoroota, which would allow barrels of flour and grain to be boated downstream to markets when water levels were high enough. Mill operators in that day kept a percentage of the grain brought to their mills as payment, and then sold the accumulated grain or flour to generate a profit (Stanton 1993).
In 1745, Thomas Shepherd was appointed overseer of a local road, in place of Van Swearingen (Fred. Cty Court Journal, No. 2, p.2, in Smyth 1909).
This year also marked the death of John Van Meter, who had been living upstream of the Jones Mill near present-day Rocky Marsh Run about 2 miles west of the little community being developed by John’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband Thomas Shepherd. John had spent the last years of his life raising horses in what became known as the Van Meter Marsh patent. He had given away in 1744 “all stalyons, geldings, mares and colts, running in the woods, branded on the left shoulder with the letter M” to various family members (Smythe 1909).
Note: Joseph and Remembrance Williams, brothers of Poulson’s wife Ann, are mentioned in several deeds in the Frederick County Court House in Winchester on land near Jones Mill and the area that eventually becomes RiverView Farm within the Poulson, Mounts and Jones grant about this time. Two adjacent parcels were described with them as owners?, but they seem not to have taken possession of the properties; this is probably a case of double titles for the same property, the confusion in part from the ongoing Hite-Fairfax controversy.
1746 - A death threw Peter Beller’s title to the Springwood property into doubt. By decree of the Frederick County court, May 1746, Peter Beller “recovered from Jonathon Simmons/Seaman an infant heir-at-law to Jonathon Seaman, late of Frederick County” the 317 acres Simmons Sr had bought from Joseph Mounts - the Springwood tract (described in Frederick County, VA Deed Book 4, p.121). It seems that Jonathon Simmons Sr died before the real estate sale to Beller was recorded (it was a long journey to the Frederick County Court House), automatically giving the property to Simmons, Jr., who was still a youngster. Beller filed suit in Chancery Court to recover the property, the court acknowledged Beller’s ownership and “ordered” the infant to honor the transaction when he was legally old enough to do so - within six months of his 21st birthday (this finally took place in 1762, after Beller sold the property to Van Swearingen, as will be seen). One can imagine Beller standing on the hill overlooking the river and mumbling ruefully “Mein Gott in Himmel” over this state of affairs…
1747 -Twelve years after his first visit, Lord Fairfax came back to the Virginia colony from Great Britain to defend and administer his Proprietary claims. He had settled his affairs in the British Isles and planned to live the rest of his life in the Virginia colony. A map of his Proprietary was finally published this year.
1748 - Thomas Swearingen acquired a 222 acre parcel (purchased from Richard Poulson) near the mill and the mouth of Rocky Marsh Run (Frederick County, VA DB 1, p. 396). He may have taken over the operation of the old Jones Mill there at this time, along with taking on the responsibilities and care of the Jones orphans.
1749 - Lord Fairfax, now living in Virginia full time, set up a land office near Winchester (strategically located not far from the Hites) and began surveying and selling grants of land. If a settler wanted title to unclaimed land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, the only choice now was to deal with the Fairfax land office. Fairfax employed a number of young men to survey portions of his Proprietary, including George Washington. Fairfax was also 33
commissioned Justice of the Peace for all Northern Neck lands, and served as local magistrate, county lieutenant, and vestryman of the Anglican Church. “Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in that part of Great Britain called Scotland, Proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia” was now established as the ruler of over 5 million acres. The Fairfax land office generally just re-granted land surveyed and sold by the Hites back to the Hites and their purchasers, despite all the squabbles, though this did not stop the antagonism between the two groups on the 27 contested parcels. Unfortunately Fairfax could not just re-grant the land on Terrapin Neck to the Hite purchaser (Browning), because Browning was dead and buried on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, had never settled the property, and had no heirs around claiming possession; the late date of the survey and sale may have also been a factor. The Swearingens, Jeremiah York and others in the vicinity of Terrapin Neck were among the first to apply to Fairfax for grants of land they already occupied and elsewhere.
The Hite family and their partners were likely a bitter, dejected lot at this time, though in the back of their minds all those years they must have considered the possibility that the Fairfax claim would be legally recognized. Despite almost 20 years of work their expected fortunes had not been realized and the courts offered their only hope of reclaiming their perceived losses. Predictably, Joist Hite and his partners filed their own lawsuit to test the validity of the Fairfax claim and to regain 36,686 acres of land that they had surveyed but hadn’t been able to patent because of Fairfax suddenly showing up out of the blue waving a decree from the King (including the 1200 acres on Terrapin Neck that had been surveyed 6 months past the deadline). The Hite land grants were in dire legal straits, and the Hite family certainly didn’t want to lose the bond money they would have to pay if their buyer’s titles proved defective! The Hites were only one of about a dozen groups of speculators who had been surveying and selling land in the Shenandoah Valley prior to Fairfax gaining legal title, but the Hites were the only land speculators who Fairfax could not seem to accommodate to their satisfaction, which Fairfax blamed in part on the Hite’s effrontery (Hyman 1996).
1750 - Peter Beller moved from his patented Springwood tract to a new 400 acre Fairfax grant near present-day Baker Heights (O’Dell 1995). With the 300+ patented acres on the Potomac and the new 400 acre grant, this suggests that Beller was primarily interested in plantation agriculture with shoemaking a sideline business benefiting friends and neighbors. Thomas Swearingen received a Fairfax grant of 478 acres next to his brother Van’s patented tract near present-day Shepherdstown; he had been living on the property near his mill, but was making plans for a new house and perhaps a ferry by this time, closer to Thomas Shepherd’s little town.
Farmers in the middle colonies, seeing diminishing returns from their fields, began using clover and grasses to help restore nitrogen to the soil about this time, 100 years after farmers in England first began the practice. Within a few years, wheat exports from these same middle colonies, including Maryland and northern Virginia, would account for about 20% of all colonial exports (Dufour 1994). 34
35
1752 - On 14 January, Van Swearingen received a grant from Fairfax for 187 acres near the entry to present-day Terrapin Neck Road, just south of the Beller property (maps are from data provided by G. Geertsema). The shape of the grant indicated he may have had an eye on the Beller property to the north, because the two properties combined would create a much more square shape than the original 1734 Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent boundary, while the 187 acres alone would be small, strangely shaped, and provide no significant source of water. His first foray into Fairfax grants may have been a disappointing experience. Whoever recorded the deed got his name wrong (Van Swaringham), and the surveyor used the wrong tree to describe the western corner, creating an issue with an earlier survey by his neighbor to the south (Richard Morgan) that had to be remedied. He also purchased a warrant for, and had surveyed, an additional 321 river-front acres on the east side of his patented land purchased in 1744 (now the Cress Creek development), and waited for a grant to be issued. His family had grown to 6 children by this time. The vestry of the Episcopal Church of Frederick County may have had at least two tight-faced members in their meetings this year, as it included among its membership John Hite (son of Joist Hite), Lord Fairfax, and Thomas Swearingen (Couper 1952).
1753 - Van Swearingen paid for a warrant and survey for a 200 acre tract along the unpatented northern boundary of Terrapin Neck, but waited over 6 years for the official grant from Fairfax to be issued. The deed would later describe, in standard fashion, 400 acres of waste land currently not claimed by anyone. He couldn’t claim all of Terrapin Neck since Jeremiah York already had a Fairfax grant for 323 acres out on the eastern end of the Neck, Vachel Medcalfe claimed an additional 300 acres, and Abraham James claimed 196 acres at the base of the Neck. Van and his neighbors almost certainly were aware of the Browning purchase in 1736, and the fact that the 1736 survey was completed past the deadline, but seemed willing to take a chance on Fairfax grants since a Browning had never asserted a right to the property. The surveyor for Fairfax was Thomas Rutherford, whose son eventually married Van’s daughter Drucilla. Van Swearingen may have been living on Peter Beller’s property (Springwood) by this time, but hadn’t paid for it yet. His neighbor out on the end of the Neck, Jeremiah York, sold his 323 acres for which he had received a Fairfax grant two years before to a William Chapline for 58 pounds - thus indicating that Chapline was not particularly worried about the Hite/Browning claim at this point (FCDB 3, p. 90). York, on the other hand, avoided any further legal machinations over title to land in the Fairfax Proprietary by selling out and moving to North Carolina with several other local families.
1754 - British settlers, traders and explorers heading west over the Appalachian mountains ran into French settlers and explorers heading south and east, with tensions rising over which European group would control the upper Potomac area and the Ohio River Valley. Many of the Native American groups living in what are now Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and New York had become familiar with the French traders and settlers during the more than 100 years of French exploration of the area, and some were convinced to ally with the French in their dispute with the British colonies. Several years later the British had their own Native allies for a short time, when the Cherokee and other groups in the Carolinas decided to weigh in on the side of the British. Later the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the British to use the growing British power to retain control over Native groups in the Ohio River valley. The various Indian groups across the continent had old alliances and scores to settle dating back decades or even hundreds of years, and it had long been common practice for them to travel thousands of miles to trade or 36
fight with other Natives - their participation in the British-French squabble over half a continent was a variation on a very familiar lifestyle for many of them.
By 1754 the French and Indian War had begun in earnest, the conflict – international in scope and also referred to as the Seven Years War – sparked by a young George Washington and a group of Virginians and Native Americans who together attacked a small party of Frenchmen sent to parley with the British group, killing and wounding (and eventually scalping) a number of them in a treacherous, less-than-honorable fashion even after a cease-fire had been in effect (who did what and when is still a matter of some controversy). Virginia’s Governor Dinwiddie, who had picked Washington to lead the expedition, was a major stockholder in a business venture known as The Ohio Company, which hoped to realize enormous profits by settling and trading in the upper Ohio River country. (Note that this venture was located in what is now western Pennsylvania, an area well north of the Potomac River which had been clearly defined as the boundary of the Virginia colony – a Virginia claim for this area took some real chutzpa). This gave Dinwiddie a personal incentive to send an inexperienced, unmotivated, poorly outfitted, unpopular, expensive military expedition to protect the company’s trading posts near present-day Pittsburgh, led by an enthusiastic 21-year-old surveyor named Washington intent on making a name for himself (see Anderson, 2001). Settlements in the lower Shenandoah Valley were attacked repeatedly by Indians over the next few years, and the terrified settlers occasionally dropped everything they were doing and banded together in panic-stricken caravans heading back east over the Blue Ridge. Several families and forts in the Martinsburg-Shepherdstown area were annihilated in raids; note that the terror was not a vicarious experience the Terrapin Neck settlers read about in the paper, but a horror that preyed on their imaginations every time a noise was heard in the night over a several year period. Peace would not come soon for the settlements further west; in fact, intermittent fighting in the upper Potomac Highlands and further west along the Ohio River would continue for more than 40 years. Authorities in Virginia committed a portion of their military forces to frontier forts to protect against war parties coming from the north, but an even larger number of militia were kept near home to protect the colony from a potential slave uprising. A fort was built in Thomas Shepherd’s little town around this time to protect the local settlers, and most of the men were required to join the local militia. Shepherd had begun to lay out town lots by this time and felt compelled to offer them on good terms to keep people from running away from the strife-torn area (see Dandridge 1910). Interestingly, his wife Elizabeth’s name was included on all the deeds over the years as co-owner and co-seller, indicating she considered herself a partner in the land business, an interest she may have picked up from her father John Van Meter. Thomas and Elizabeth Shepherd this year also became the proud parents of a fifth son, the eighth of their nine children; they named him Abraham. Abraham Shepherd will become a salient figure in the history of Terrapin Neck.
In his capacity now as a Justice of Frederick County, Thomas Swearingen took several depositions regarding the granting of land by the Fairfax land office (McKay 1951).
1755 - Title problems continued to plague many settlers in the area. For example, 100 acres of Thomas Swearingen’s 222 acres near Scrabble were bought and sold several times by other parties who had bought it from Joseph Mounts, even though J. Poulson had sold all 222 acres in 1748 to Swearingen (Frederick Cty VA DB 4, p. 190 and 193). It’s unknown if Swearingen knew about this at the time.37
Thomas Swearingen also received official sanction from the Virginia Council to operate a Ferry “from the land of Thomas Swearingen in the county of Frederick, over Potomack River, to the land opposite thereto in the province of Maryland” just north of the land owned and being developed by the Shepherds as a new town; this area also became known as Swearingen’s Ferry at the time - distinguishing this river crossing from Harper’s Ferry, which was down the river a few miles, and Watkin’s Ferry to the north. First mention of a Swearingen ferry at this location is in a 6 March 1753 Frederick County court road order appointing Capt. Richard Morgan as “overseer of the road from Jacob Hites to Mr Swearingen’s ferry” (Luckman and Miller 2005). Thomas would be remembered ever after as “Thomas of the Ferry”. The regulation of public ferries in Virginia was controlled at the Virginia Assembly, meaning Thomas had to get a bill passed in the Virginia Assembly before public ferry operations could be officially sanctioned. Ferries in Maryland, on the other hand, were either sponsored by the county (the ferryman was a salaried county employee), or unregulated private enterprise until a ferry regulation law was passed in 1781, meaning that Thomas Swearingen did not have to get a separate license from the colonial authorities in Maryland. The growing little community near Pack Horse Ford (i.e. the Shepherds) agreed to maintain a road from the town to the ferry landing near the present-day Bellevue property, while Marylanders built a road along the route through present-day Boonsboro and Sharpsburg to the ferry landing on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Thomas Swearingen was authorized to charge three pence, three farthings per person, and the same amount per horse. Separate prices were specified for various carriages, carts and wagons, while tobacco hogsheads and cattle cost the same as a horse, each sheep or goat cost one-fifth of a horse, and each hog cost one-fourth of a horse (Henning’s Statutes, May 1755, 28th year of George II, Chapter 12, An Act appointing several new Ferries).
In 1755 he ferried General Edward Braddock and part of his military force across the river on their ill-fated expedition to fight the French and Indians near the site of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Maryland Governor Horatio Sharpe, namesake of Sharpsburg, accompanied the expedition, and later reported paying “to Thomas Swearingen on Potomac for ferriage of General Braddock party and guard £8.2.0” (Green and Hahn, Ferry Hill Plantation Journal). Thomas Swearingen Jr. is mentioned as a Captain of a militia company at this time, as was his father Thomas and later his uncle Van Swearingen (Chalkley, v.2, p.503). Militia leader Adam Stephen, in a Nov. 1755 report to George Washington, mentioned that “Sweringhame was orderd out last Tuesday with 100 Men, to reconnoiter towards Sleepy-Creek, and the Warm Springs; but is not gone yet He & Caton cannot make up the number between them, so many have run off” (George Washington Papers Colonial Series 2: 158-162).
Thomas Swearingen’s ferry landing on the Virginia side of the river presented no ownership issues because it was located on his own property. The ferry landing on the opposite side, though, was potentially a problem because the property was owned at first by his neighbors in Virginia. Directly across the river from his Virginia property was the black walnut tree dividing the property known as Pell Mell then owned by the Shepherd family, from the property called Spurgin’s Lot, owned by William Spurgin, part of a larger tract called Antietam Bottom. Swearingen chose to land the ferry on the downstream side of the black walnut on Spurgin’s property, which seems not to have bothered Spurgin since he sold the 50 acre property to Swearingen three years later (Fred. Cty Md DB F, p. 504). The Shepherds, on the other hand, 38
later seem to seriously question the property boundary between the ferry landing and Pell Mell and claimed that the Swearingens were using the wrong walnut tree as a boundary marker. And so the controversy begins.
In January of 1755, Maryland’s Governor Sharpe traveled the Potomac River in a small boat from upstream near present-day Cumberland to tidewater at Georgetown, in order to assess what work needed to be done to make the river more navigable for boats floating military equipment and farm products. Baltimore merchants tended to balk at any scheme to promote Potomac River commerce, preferring that goods move through their own ports, so the lead for development of the Potomac River was carried on by Virginia mercantile interests, most notably a young George Washington who had been on his own inspection tours of the Potomac in August of that year (Hahn 1984). The Swearingens were likely using the Potomac to transport flour, tobacco, wheat and various other goods to the growing markets downstream in Alexandria and Georgetown. They were no doubt very familiar with the impassable Great Falls and Little Falls and other navigation hazards on the lower Potomac because they had grown up near the Fall Line, and still had relatives living there. Their farm products were likely offloaded above Great Falls and then loaded onto wagons for transport to the developing shipping ports on the tidal section of the river.
1756 - Van Swearingen purchased from Peter Beller 317 acres of the original Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent for 135 pounds (FCDB 4, p. 121). Now he officially owned the Springwood tract, which was just north of the Fairfax grant he had purchased several years before. Peter Beller may have been trying to escape all the troubles with title on Terrapin Neck - including waiting for the “infant” Simmons to sign a release when he reached the age of majority, the dispute between Hite and Fairfax on neighboring land, plus there were a lot of slaves and slave owners moving into the neighborhood which German Protestants generally objected to. Beller also gave Van Swearingen power of attorney to deal with any problems arising from this sale and young Simmons (FCDB 4, p.123). Apparently none of these problems dissuaded his neighbor Van Swearingen, who was a slave owner and may have been a distant relative of Simmons (Van’s cousin and sister-in-law Elizabeth was married to another Jonathon Simmons, who died in 1761 in Prince George’s County, MD). The Swearingen family also had the experience of the past two generations that settled frontier lands of Maryland; they may have been more comfortable with the inevitable problems in a new country. For example, Van’s uncle (and father-in-law) had settled on a piece of property in Maryland about 5 miles north of Terrapin Neck on St. James Run, built a house and other improvements, and then discovered someone else (probably Lord Baltimore’s 10,594 acre Conococheague Manor tract) had a prior claim - he had to settle for negotiating a lifetime lease for himself and his sons.
Note that some or all of the Springwood tract (now the eastern portion of NCTC) had been farmed by Europeans for more than 25 years before Van Swearingen acquired it officially, suggesting that reduced soil fertility may already have impacted the types of farming activities taking place on the new Swearingen plantation.
1757 - Thomas Swearingen polled 270 votes to George Washington’s 40 votes for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. His successful election meant that he, along with Hugh West, would represent Frederick County in the House sessions of March 25, 1756, April 30, 1757, and 39
March 30, 1758. His son, also named Thomas Swearingen, 22 years old and married to Mary Morgan, built a stone house next to his father’s mill just west of present-day NCTC, which is still a private residence today. They had a son named Thomas (of course) that same year.
1758 - In September Van Swearingen purchased an adjacent 132 acres of the Poulson, Mounts and Jones patent for 70 pounds “Pennsylvania money” that eventually became RiverView Farm (Frederick Cty VA DB 5, p. 187) and is now the western portion of NCTC; the boundaries were somewhat different than present. This was purchased from Joseph Poulson; there is no evidence that this was later regranted by Fairfax, but like the adjacent Springwood parcel a patent from the 1730s already covered it. Van and his brother Thomas together now owned several miles of contiguous waterfront on the Potomac adjacent to Terrapin Neck. Thomas was likely the wealthier and more influential of the two brothers by this time, having acquired over 1600 acres of land on the Virginia side of the river alone, in addition to his property in Maryland (where his ferry landed) and elsewhere. He was the elected representative from Frederick County in the Virginia House of Burgesses and a captain in the local militia. He also owned a mill near Scrabble (Jones Mill), and owned the ferry business across the Potomac River. His ferry alone had the potential to make him a wealthy man. In Fry and Jefferson’s map of Virginia for this time period, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road is shown crossing the Potomac at Swearingen’s Ferry. Settler families and assorted travelers numbering in the tens of thousands formed a steady procession south over this road at the time. Relatively low land prices in the Carolinas attracted newly-arrived immigrants as well as many settlers from the more northern colonies. It has been described as the most heavily traveled road in all America at the time, with perhaps more traffic than all the other main roads together (Rouse 1995). Some of these settlers, of course, chose to cross the Potomac further north at Watkins Ferry, established by the Virginia House of Burgesses Oct 9, 1744 at the site of present-day Williamsport, and they could cross at various fords when the water was low enough, but the Swearingen ferry, no doubt, did a considerable business. Also competing for business was Harpers Ferry a few river miles to the south, first mentioned in road maintenance court orders in 1755, but established officially a few years later in 1761 (Luckman and Miller 2005). Travelers in Virginia at this time could generally beg or barter meals, lodging and other needs, but if they wanted to cross the river without getting wet, they generally had to pay cash. A busy ferry operator therefore could expect to acquire bags of coin that other businesses and individuals would, of course, covet.
Thomas Swearingen was portrayed by George Washington, in a Oct. 9, 1757 letter to Governor Dinwiddie, “as a man of great weight with the meaner class of people, and supposed by them to possess extensive knowledge”, the description resulting from an altercation in Winchester where several townspeople had been found with military stores hidden in their homes. Much to the annoyance of Washington, the other local magistrates preferred waiting for Thomas Swearingen to arrive before passing judgement. (George Washington had also described the settlers of the Shenandoah Valley as a “parcel of barbarians”, Brown 1965). Lord Fairfax, in a September 1, 1756 letter to Washington, also expressed his less-than-enthusiastic opinion of Thomas Swearingen’s handling of militia matters during the French and Indian War by writing “Captain Swearingen... has always done everything in his power to occasion confusion if his advice was not taken in everything” (George Washington Papers Colonial Series 3:384-85). The Swearingen’s militia company at least had strict requirements for attendance: “At a Court Martial held for Frederick County on Fryday the 27th October 1758 Ordered that Joshua Hedges of the Company 40
commanded by Captain Thomas Swearingen be fined 10 shillings for absenting himself from One General Muster within a twelve months this last past” (Hedges family genealogy forum entry).
George Washington again ran for election for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses--in absentia because of military duties during the hostilities with the French (which he had helped instigate). Necessarily this time he had the campaign handled by friends. He defeated Thomas Swearingen by being much in the news with his military